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In those far off and stony days, in that friendless and furless Time Before Rafael, my wife and I watched Bad Sisters, an Apple TV show.

(Now that we have Rafael the Squirrel in our home, we still watch TV, but he’s a menace. Until he decides it’s his bedtime, he jumps around the room, annoying the dog and throwing food everywhere. His favourite snack is crisps, the only thing he doesn’t eat messily. When he does decide it’s bedtime, he goes down either my jumper or my wife’s jumper, rolls onto his back and snuffles and snorts with happiness. We reckon we have about 2-3 weeks more of R the S before he’s ready for the Great Outdoors. He still can’t quite crack a nut without help. But watching dramas broken into 50-minute episodes becomes quite an undertaking if you keep having to break to remove a squirrel from the missus’s hair or trying to get him out of a crisp packet.)

Anyway: Bad Sisters.

The show involves five sisters, one of whom is married to an unpleasant and controlling man, JP. We start the season knowing that JP has recently died and knowing that he was unbeloved of those he left behind. But was he murdered or not? A life insurance investigator wants to prove that he was murdered, and by the team of sisters, and thereby save his ailing insurance business. The cast is very strong. The sense of family and layered histories and relationships and Irish coastal settings are all strong. The comedy? Well, it’s funny but not uproarious. The drama? Well, it’s involving but not edge of the seat. But the whole concoction just works. It’s warm and funny and dark and just about credible enough and dramatic and new and unexpected.

Most of all, though, the basic concept is armour-plated.

Did the sisters kill JP? Well, I won’t tell you that, but I will say that they give it a go … and you won’t know what actually happened till right at the end. The show has a kind of And Then There Were None beauty and necessity to it.

If no one had ever written And Then There Were None (or, for that matter, Murder on the Orient Express), it would be essential for someone to do so. Those concepts have an urgency – a kind of necessity – like an uncompleted mathematical proof that nags at you until it’s done.

Sure enough, the show got a 100% positive review rating on Rotten Tomatoes and went on to secure multiple wins and nominations at various TV awards ceremonies. A great concept, well-executed: that’s the result.

But TV is TV.

If you get a series that everyone loves, you have to have another. In the land of the novel, it’s a bit like that, but not really. In novel-land, the author is the brand, so if you churn out a masterpiece (Pride & Prejudice, say), it’s fine for you to follow up with Emma. You don’t have to write Lizzie and Darcy Have Kids, Lizzie and Darcy Go Travelling, Lizzie and Darcy Sort Out Their Pensions and Go for an Amusing Escapade in France.

But – in TV-land, the brand isn’t the author, or the actor, it’s the show itself. So, yes, you have to force these things into a second series.

But what? Bad Sisters was about killing (or not killing?) JP. Once he’s dead, he’s dead. You can’t really have the sisters try to bump off anyone else: that’s just ludicrous. The story arc has been beautifully completed. Anything else is just artificial and not needed. So yes, another season was commissioned and filmed. But, as Rotten Tomatoes said in its summary of reviews, “The return of Bad Sisters can't help but feel like too much of a good thing, but the lived-in dynamic between these outstanding performers continues to pay highly watchable dividends.”

Basically: the show is pointless, but the actors and characters are great, so … yeah. It’s OK. My wife watched some of it, but lost interest. I’ve not watched a minute of it.

Now, I’m going to guess that many of you will not have a TV show in production with Apple. But all these thoughts still apply to you.

This month is Build Your Book Month. The aim, as you jolly well ought to know, is to give you the tools to plot your book out over the course of a month – in a way that’s structured enough to be disciplined and loose enough to give you creative freedom.

And today is 3 October: the very start of that month. And the purpose of this email is to say: Be More Bad Sisters, Season 1.

You need that level of necessity. You want a reader to think, ‘Wow, why has no one written a book about X, Y, Z before? Good job that someone has finally done so, because that I have to read.’

And that level of necessity has to extend to plot, not just idea. So, for example, “I’d love to write a time-slip novel about three generations of women who have lived in the same house in X.”

And, OK, yeah, fine. But what about those women? What’s the story? What have they been up to? Why do we have to read that tale?

Your job is not to satisfy your own wants as a writer. Your job is to deliver a concept so sharp, it could cut through floating silk.

Don’t try to take a mediocre concept and plot your way to excellence. That’s desperately hard and you can never get to more than 75% success anyway. Start with a terrific concept and then let your plotting become the natural, inevitable playing out of your idea. That works. It always will. And – it’s harder to start, but it’s much easier in the end.

If you want help with getting your concept straight, then:

• Read 11 boxes, 2 imps and 1 owl, a newsletter which involves 11 boxes, 2 imps 1 owl, and also some ideas about elevator pitches.
• Take the first lesson in our Good to Great Video Course. If you’re a Premium Member, you already have access! Please remember to log in first. If you’re not, you can get a free taster lesson here.

I’ll see lots of you 9 October for a bit of Build-Your-Bookery. (I’ll be talking about scene construction, a job which sounds like it should involve some 2x2s and plenty of paint.) My workshop details can be found here.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / From Spark To Story

This week is a little different, it's a takeover from Becca Day. 

Becca wants you to take your spark of an idea and share your novel’s premise in Townhouse. If you didn't catch the first Build Your Book Month workshop, then watch the replay of From Spark to Story with Becca Day. The first workshop is free for everyone to catch up on.

Til soon.

Harry

In today’s blog post, I’m going to be sharing the PERFECT way to plan your plot. It’s the method that trumps all other methods. If you’re not using this method, you’re doing it wrong. 

I joke. I joke. Don’t come at me. 

If you’ve been around the writing world for any length of time, you’ve probably come across all sorts of advice about how to plan your novel. Some people swear by spreadsheets and scene-by-scene breakdowns. Others can’t imagine plotting a single thing in advance, insisting that creativity comes from discovery, not planning. 

It can feel overwhelming, especially if someone claims a particular method is a game-changer and you try it, only to find it just…. doesn’t work for you. 

Here’s the truth: there is no single perfect way to plan your plot. 

And that’s not bad news. If you’re someone who came to this post hoping for a magical answer to your plot woes and feel disappointed, bear with me. The fact that there is no one perfect way to plan a novel is actually great news. 

Writing is personal 

Every writer has a different creative process. For some, plotting every beat in advance provides a safety net. For others, too much structure can feel like handcuffs. And a lot of us fall somewhere in the middle, enjoying a bit of guidance while leaving space for surprises. 

The most important thing isn’t to force yourself into a method that doesn’t feel right, but to experiment until you find the approach that helps you get the words on the page. 

Take me, for example. I’m editing my fifth book (fifth to be published, eleventy-billionth if you include the novels I tried to write before I got published), and even now I’m still experimenting with my process. I’ve tried hardcore plotting: My first and second books had spreadsheets that may have called my sanity into question. I’ve tried pantsing: My third book was written with a vague idea of the beginning and ending in mind. And I’ve tried doing a bit of both, which seems to work better for me, but even now I still experiment with how much plotting works for me. 

We’re about to dive into Build Your Book Month, which has a snazzy tagline of ‘outline your entire novel in 1 month’. This headline can sometimes scare people. They think, ‘I’m not a plotter so none of this will be relevant to me’. But the way we’ve designed this month is not to force a particular method on you, but to explore different aspects of story that you should think about before or as you write, whether that’s mapping it out in a spreadsheet or just turning ideas over in your head. 

Plotters, Pantsers, and everyone in between 

Writers often divide themselves into two camps: 

• Plotters carefully map out their stories before writing. They might use beat sheets, the Three-Act Structure, or even a chapter-by-chapter outline. They like knowing where the story is headed and feel more confident when they can see the big picture. 

• Pantsers (short for “seat-of-your-pants” writers) dive straight into drafting without a clear plan. They thrive on discovery, letting the characters take the lead and uncovering twists as they write. 

But a lot of writers actually live in the grey area between these extremes. Maybe you sketch a rough outline but let it shift as you go (this is what I do). Maybe you write the first act freely, then pause to outline the rest. The beauty is that there’s no wrong way to do it as long as it gets you writing. Maybe you plan out the direction of the story, but you do it all in your head before drafting that scene. 

During Build Your Book Month, you’ll get to experiment. Want to see how character flaws can generate plot? That’s exactly what Liz Monument will cover in Designing Characters That Drive the Plot. Curious how multiple POVs could work in your novel? My Multiple POVs Without the Chaos workshop has you covered. 

The point isn’t to pick sides. It’s to discover what blend of planning and discovery helps you finish your novel. 

The world's most successful bookstore.

As you know, I’ve got a lot of kids. (How many? Not sure. I haven’t counted recently.)

And – kids grow up. They read books, then move on. And in that wake lie scattered books about football, books about horses, books about fantasy realms, books about dragon taming, books about wizardry, books about witches, books about cats who fight, books about mischief-causing cats, books about entertaining cows, books about rabbits, books about fighting, and a whole mountain more.

We wanted to get rid of this scatter, to make more space on the shelves. We could have taken them to the dump, or to a charity store, but I hit on the idea of giving them away in the school playground. My bookstore was called:

GRABBIT & GO BOOKS

Its slogan was going to be ‘The world’s finest bookstore’ but, on reflection, we thought there was some room for argument, so we struck out the word ‘finest’ and replaced it with ‘cheapest’. The price of every book was £0.00, unless you were paying in dollars in which case we charged $0.00.

Our one real condition was that we didn’t want kids wandering off with just one book. We wanted to get rid of the things, so if a boy picked up a book about football, I shoved a stack of other football books at him, and he wandered away with ten.

(And by the way, if you are ever struggling with writer’s block, may I suggest you write the biography of a famous footballer? I’ll start you off:

Omar was sure that Mo would never be able to compete with these highly trained 18-year-olds. “Mo, you will never be able to compete with these highly trained 18-year-olds,” he said. “They are much bigger and stronger than you are.” But Mo simply grinned and juggled the ball. “You just watch, boss,” he laughed. He felt nervous at first, but then the game started. The skinny ten-year-old dribbled the ball round all 11 players on the opposition team and then dribbled around his own players too, a goat, and a Toyota pickup. He let fly a volley from the edge of the box. His kick was so strong, the ball tore through the net and was last seen overflying the Zambezi. Mo’s team ended up winning 109-0. At the end of the game, Omar chuckled and said, “With a little more training, you might be quite good one day.”

Write that same story, again and again, throw in something about a Champions League final, and make sure when somebody exclaims “Goal!”, they use at least 20 characters, including a great many exclamation marks.)

Picking books for kids is quite easy.

Boy with short hair? Football.

Older boy with shorter hair? Book about fighting.

Boy not interested in books on either topic? Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Very young girl? Book about unicorns.

Young girl? Book about cats, horses or rabbits.

Older girl? Same thing, except make sure the cats are fighting.

Pre-teen girl? Book about teen girls committing / solving murder in a boarding school.

And zoom. The books went. I started with a fold-out picnic table so heavy with stacks of books that I didn’t have room for them all. I ended up with one carrier bag of discards which will probably, in time, find their way to a charity shop.

Reflections?

Well, first there was real excitement in the playground. Obviously, if I’d been giving away cakes, the cakes would have gone just as fast, but there’d have been less glee. A cake is only ever a cake. A book is a portal to – well, adventure. The unknown. It's a ship setting sail from a sparkling harbour. Giving books to kids was honestly one of my most joyous moments of the year.

Second: free works.

It just works. There’s joy in the giveaway. It’s not a tool that traditional publishers use very much, but it’s an indie author staple. Genre readers are – often, often, often – like kids. They want to find a new author that they can make theirs. Free is a way to shove your Book #1 novel to the top of their reading pile. And once it’s there, and once they’ve read it, there’s every chance they go on to buy everything else, full price, and happily. (And, uh, if you’re interested in self-publishing, I think we’ve got only two or three places left on the upcoming course. So, if you’re keen, pull your boots on.)

And third, lordy lord, all this loveliness does seem a little under threat.

Headline sales of print books remain basically static – up a bit in one year, down a bit in another – but since those headlines always exclude self-pub books, and since self-pub collectively is at least the size of Penguin Random House, it’s probable that overall sales today are close to all-time records.

So, yes, books sell and there’s not much sign of them not doing so.

But the cracks in the palace are big and getting bigger. Here’s a recent gloomy view from The Economist:

Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them. In other words: some students reading English literature were asked to read some English literature from the mid-19th century. How hard could it be?

Very, it turns out. The students were flummoxed by legal language and baffled by metaphor. A Dickensian description of fog left them totally fogged. They could not grasp basic vocabulary: one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?” The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate.

Reading is in trouble. Multiple studies in multiple places seem to be showing the same thing. Adults are reading less. Children are reading less. Teenagers are reading a lot less. Very small children are being read to less; many are not being read to at all. Reading rates are lower among poorer children … but reading is down for everyone, everywhere.

The books that I gave away in the playground reflected that.

Those football books are, I’m sure, better for kids than video games, but they are a damn sight less enriching than (say) Susan Cooper, or Watership Down, or Lemony Snicket.

Books about conflict can be terrific, but they can also just be ugly. At one stage, my kids adored the Beast Quest series. (Adored them so much that I found them playing in the garden using six-foot wooden fenceposts as swords. I removed the posts and bought some plastic swords on Amazon, relieved to have escaped a trip to the emergency room.) But the series was ugly, ugly, ugly. It had no moral tuition in it. It was just slaughter. I didn’t give those books away; I destroyed them.

And behind those ugly books: an ugly publishing model. The books name ‘Adam Blade’ as an author, but multiple authors have written the series on (I would guess) a flat-fee basis. If I were one of those authors, I’d churn out the book as fast as I could. I’d deliver the book, get paid, move on. The purpose of that publishing model is almost literally to extinguish the author. I can’t really think why you’d hire authors these days, when you could simply AI the whole thing.

There are more wholesome approaches too. I don’t love the Wimpy Kid books, but they’re healthy enough and they get non-reading kids to read. So that’s a win. But the books are still responding to a basic sense of threat. They offer less, because they are aware that more will not be palatable.

The same things are true all the way across the scale. Some of the books my 12-year-old daughter reads have a level of worldliness and violence that I did not encounter in books until much later. But – today’s authors are fighting Netflix and phones and social media and video games. And, in a war, you have to fight. You can’t be picky about how you fight.

As for me? Well, my readers are predominantly women in the second half of life. That’s a literate, thoughtful demographic that it’s a pleasure to write for.

But the future me? The author writing this email in the Year of Our Lord 2075? I’m not too sure, but I’d bet that my present readers are better than his.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Fight scene

OK, let’s have a fight scene. If you don’t have any physical conflict, then whatever comes closest. 250-300 words, plus title, genre, and any context you think we need. When you're ready, post your offering in Townhouse.

If you write like Philip Pullman, you get 100 points. If you write like Beast Quest, you are probably a robot.

Til soon.

Harry

Ooh, the pesky voice!  

When my debut novel NINE DOLLS won the Joffe Books Crime Prize in 2024, the judges said a lot of lovely things — but one line stuck with me: “It feels wholly original, with entirely its own voice.” 

I was both flattered and slightly stunned. Not because I didn’t want to believe it — but because it hadn’t come easily. I had to work hard for it: consciously, for instance across a whole week on the life changing Self-Edit Your Novel course run by the wonderful Debi Alper and Emma Darwin. But also subconsciously, as I questioned everything that my character ever did (or didn’t do), delving deeper into their mind. 

So, if you’re feeling a bit lost trying to “find your voice”, I promise you’re not alone. It doesn’t come in a flash of inspiration. It comes in layers. Below are a few things I learned along the way — my own list of Do’s and Don’ts—that helped me get closer to the kind of voice that felt, finally, like mine. 

Do...

1. Leave your fingerprint

Voice is like a fingerprint. It’s uniquely yours — formed by your scars, secrets, inside jokes, heartbreaks, and the way you see the world when no one else is watching. 

When I finally stopped trying to sound “literary” and started writing like I think — a bit messy, sometimes sharp, always curious — something shifted. The writing got warmer. It got truer. 

So, write from that place. Your voice is already in you — you just have to let it out without judgement. 

2. Gossip with your characters

You’ve probably heard that old writing exercise — take your character on a dinner date. Find out what they wear, eat, the music they listen to and all those good things. And yes, that’s important. But I’d urge you to go one step further: make them your gossip partner (or, even better, the subject of the gossip).  

That’s where the real gold is. What do they say behind someone’s back? What do they admit only when drunk? What do they pretend not to want? This is where character voice becomes textured and real — when you understand not just what your characters do, but why they do it. 

3. Say one thing, think another

This one was a game-changer for me: don’t let your characters say everything they think. Most of us have a filter — even the bluntest among us! We present one version of ourselves, while something else bubbles underneath. 

In fiction, we’re lucky: we get access to both the inside and outside of a character. Don’t be afraid to use it. Let your character say, “I’m so happy for you,” while thinking, I’d rather be hit by a truck than see you win again. That tension between outer words and inner truth? That’s the voice. That’s what makes it human. 

Rupa Mahadevan is an acclaimed author of psychological thrillers. Her debut novel, NINE DOLLS, won the Joffe Books Prize in 2024 and will be published on 25 September 2025. She grew up on the south-eastern coast of India and has lived on the south-eastern coast of Scotland for over 15 years. She now resides in Edinburgh with her husband and two children. When she isn’t working on Excel in her day job, she enjoys reading and imagining her own stories. 

Last week’s Feedback Friday asked for opening pages and (I’ve counted) about a quadzillion of you presented your openings.

And, as ever, there were good and bad and brilliant and baffling submissions across every genre and every possible topic. Also, as ever, a few themes came up for me as I ran my hands through this abundance.

One theme was: too fast, too fast, too fast, too fast!

Another was: too little, too little, too little!

I’ll get to what I mean in a moment, but first let’s remember what we want from that opening page.

We’re asking a busy person with 10,000 things in their head to leave the Real Actual World they live in and start to think about a person who never existed in a situation that never was. That’s a pretty loopy thing for anyone to want to do and they’re only going to want to do it if they care a bit about the character you’re presenting them with.

And yes, for the reader to care, they’ll need to know the story situation. (Aerobatic pilot engaged in a complex manouevre? Roman boy-king on the run for his life? Escaped witch hunted in a forest? Or whatever else.)

But before the story situation even matters, you have to do something else. You have to get the reader to believe that your person is real and that the world on which they tread is real. You have to start to grey out the reader’s Real Actual World and create one that is – or feels – more real.

So, creating a bond between reader and character: that’s the first thing.

The second has to do with establishing story, yes … but, right now, your entire project is a wee, fragile thing. You’re planting out your sweet-peas in early- or mid-May, a touch early, and the risk of frost (or a reader putting your book back on its pile in the bookstore) is still acute. So your story moves at this stage are careful, not huge. A foal can’t carry the load of a five-year-old hunter.

The typical story move for your opening section is therefore pretty small, pretty careful. Your main job here, lighting this candle, is simply to watch that the flame takes. The win here isn’t that you have a raging bonfire at the end of page one. The win is that the wick takes the flame and the flame establishes. Once it’s done so, you can make bigger, bolder moves in the confidence that the reader moves with you.

But that’s not quite all we ask from our openings.

The first-page reader is a sacred beast. The page-two-hundred reader? Pah! You can treat her like a fatted calf, to be pushed, prodded and barked around a muddy field. You can play rough games with that reader. She won’t mind.

But the first-page reader? Ah, this person is sacred, because they hold a bank card in their hand and they are trembling on the knife edge of desire. Will they buy or will they decline? They need to feel, somehow, from this opening page or two, that the story will deliver all that they want from it. And yes: this reader already has several sources of information. The way you’ve been shelved in a bookshop or on Amazon. The cover design. The title. The blurb.

So yes, those things help support a buy decision, but the opening page is the thing you ask to clinch it. So we need (A) the promise of a story big enough and moving enough to get the reader to part with some cash but (B) no moves so big that they break the developing relationship between reader and character.

Now that sounds like a contradiction, except that the reader is a skilled and subtle beast. They divine Big Story from tiny clues. And your third task with your opening page or two is: foreshadow the story that is to come.

The foreshadowing can certainly be oblique. It can reside in a mood, a sentence or two, a trivial incident, a handful of words. But (done right) you’ve passed a token from writer to reader: ‘I, the author, promise you that I will deliver on the story that you intuit (in some semi-conscious, hard-to-define) way. You can trust my future story, because my moves right now are so confident, so fully in control, you know I’m not going to mess up down the road.’

One very nice piece from Feedback Friday had a woman see a car that she recognised. The woman enters a pub to find its owner, but walks out again having not found him. That’s the very tiny (very newborn-foal-friendly) movement we start the novel with. But that tiny non-encounter nudges the character to remember her old tutor lying back in his seat and listening to the blues. The passage ended “I’d seen those eyes shut a few other times. I retract that he didn’t teach much; he taught me a thing or two.”

And poof! Even the dullest reader, even a clod with a headful of pudding, will intuit that there’s a love story here. And not too chaste either: we have blues music and sex and long afternoons with tumbled sheets all here … just barely mentioned.

That’s perfect.

So the too fast, too fast observation I started with comes down to writers hurrying to get their Big Story down on the page before the reader is really ready – before the reader has fully bonded with the character. The trouble with that hurrying speed is that the Big Story tends to crush the reader-character bond under its wheels. And the reader-character bond has to come first. Without that, nothing else exists or matters.

As for the too little, too little observation: there I want to say that some openings don’t do enough to gesture at the story that’s to come. They offer a Dramatic Incident, yes, but that Dramatic Incident doesn’t really do enough to guide me as to the shape of what’s to come.

And all this sounds complex, but it’s easy enough to do. Here, for not much reason except that the novel was to hand, is the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.

As the prologue continues, we learn that the narrator is a captain in the British Army of the Second World War. He’s about to move out of a Scottish training camp with his men.

That’s the bare situation and, yes, it’s interesting enough to sustain us and, yes, small enough that we don’t feel overcrowded by too much story too soon.

But look at those underlinings.

“Paused and looked back”: this whole book is a looking back, a reminiscence. Any novel written in the past tense is, technically, a reminiscence, but BR revels in its nostalgic gaze – makes a feature of it. (The time-of-war narrator looking back at his time-of-peace past emphasises the change in the world between Then and Now.)

“No single happy memory … loved had died”: this tells us that there’s a love story here, but an unhappy one, a failure.

That sounds rather bleak: why would you fork out for a book that’s all set to depress you? Except that I think there’s one more bit of (really lovely) foreshadowing which complicates that simple story. Because Waugh also says, “three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding.” That’s not a movement from happy to bleak; it’s the exact opposite.

So Waugh has given us two contradictory messages here. The most overt one is, “This is going to be a very bleak love story, with plenty of reminiscence.” But the secondary, almost hidden one is, “this is a story of growth, and bloom, and hope, and life.”

And, darn it, but that’s exactly what this book is: a sad love story (Ryder + Sebastian, and also Ryder + Julia) but also a very hopeful one (Ryder + God.)

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that writing a sad love story about God is a brilliant way to make sales in the 21^st century, but your story is what it is. Foreshadow that. Do it with wit. Do it obliquely. Do it with a sentence. Do it with an image. But do it gently. Don’t break the plant that hasn’t yet put down roots.

Got that? Good. Now execute.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Opening page

Same exercise as last week.

If my yipper-yapper in this email has struck a chord, then revise that opening page. Upload that first 250-300 words (with title + genre) and write a line or two about what you’ve changed and why.

And you know what? Even if you’re dead happy with your opening, go ahead and edit that. Post in Townhouse here.

And remember:

1. Create the bond between reader & character
2. Move gently
3. Foreshadow the Big Story.

That’s enough of my yipper-yapper. Now up and at em.

Til soon.

Harry

Hello again! Welcome back to my series of insights into what it’s like to undertake the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

Month six means I’m now halfway through the course. Time really does speed up when you’re having your mind stuffed full of wonderful writing skills. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the halfway-through-the-course milestone is marked with the topic of ‘Pacing and Tension’...  

A critical story requirement, ‘Pace and Tension’ is the stuff that compels a reader to begin reading, keeps them turning pages to the end and, ideally, still hooked on the story beyond the final page. It’s what inspires us to implore our friends that they simply must read this book, too. It is the stuff of publishing lore. It’s what marks out the okay story from the brilliant story.  

Gaining expertise in this month’s topic of writing-wizardry is relevant for all writers and all stories. I’m writing within the literary genre and so might be tempted to think that this month’s topic sounds a bit too genre-trope-driven. But I’d be wrong. Whilst my stories may not feature a murder, a city-centre car chase or a cat-stroking international criminal, they still need to intrigue and compel, evoke movement and transformation. What author doesn’t dream of the fabled ‘a real page turner, kept me hooked to the end’ type of five-star review?

There are many methods by which it’s possible to engender that compulsion to find out what’s going to happen, and it’s clear we’re to be schooled in all of them this month: how to reveal and withhold information; how to ratchet pace up and slow it down (which you might think decreases tension, but can, if deployed effectively, increase it); how to raise the stakes for the character and ensure that each scene plays a role in keeping the reader locked in.  

We’re also being reminded of how every single month’s topic leading up to this point has prepared us. For instance, the choice of how to structure the timeline of a story plays a significant role in building pace and intrigue - something we learned about in Month 1, ‘Planning’. Month 2's ‘Point of View’ choices - third person / first person / unreliable narrator – are another core technique. Come Month 3, we were learning about how choices regarding setting were vital to lift and deepen our stories: another useful mechanism for controlling pace and curiosity. Months 4 and 5 dealt with ‘Character’ and ‘Emotions & Senses’ – the starting point for any story tension. An unrelatable, boring character always stalls tension and damages pace, no matter how many craft tricks an author throws into the mix. 

So, yes, we are at the midpoint of the course - classically the pivotal moment in a novel, or as James Scott Bell (author of Write Your Novel From the Middle) put it, “…the moment that tells what the novel or movie is really about.”  

It’s a point of no return; arguably the biggest turning point of the story. It’s where characters discover what they truly need versus what they thought they wanted. At the very least, it is the point at which the reader understands this. With the midpoint, we get deeper stakes, sharper goals and consequences closing in, with characters having no choice but to move from reaction to intentional action.  

And, in a moment of beautiful synchronicity this midpoint has applied to me, as a student of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, too. Recently, my tutor, Andrew Miller – himself no stranger to writing deeply compelling page turners, as evidenced by his latest longlisting for the Booker Prize – asked me a simple question. One that is, in fact, a core question my story needs to answer if I am to be successful in the tension and pace stakes: “But, what is [the main character] going to do with her [ESP type] skills?”  

I gave him an answer, of sorts. But Andrew’s question stayed with me. It niggled at me, and nagged, and niggled some more – and I realised my first answer was not good enough. It had dealt with important aspects of characterisation and themes but didn’t answer how I was raising the stakes or fundamentally changing how my character turned up in the world. What to do…?  

Ah-hah! In due course, the perfect plot device popped into my mind – a set of scenes showing specific actions which demonstrate a tonal shift, the character’s emotional crystallisation from relative despondency to determination, the provocation to utilise her set of special skills and the consequences which round out the story arc and her emotional journey. I duly emailed Andrew with my corrected answer and received an encouraging ‘go-for-it’ reply. 

I think this is why the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme often ends up being the turning point in many author’s careers. At the same time as I’m learning about turning points in the craft (and writing about them in this here blog) I’m given a turning point all of my very own. Real life proof that points of no return do happen; movement forward, beyond perceived boundaries, boosts to my writerly heart, girding my conviction to keep on keeping on writing, seeking to be the best writer I can be.  

The tweak to my character’s plot is wholly my idea, but I got there because of a wise and timely question posed by an author and tutor who is steeped in experience about how stories, and lives, may turn upon such tiny moments.  

This month’s Ultimate Novel Writing Programme topic has already paid me its dividends: improving the potential of my manuscript. All I’ve got to do is go write it. Simples!  

Until next time… 

Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

My (kindly) 12-year-old daughter’s two favourite insults for me at the moment are:

“You’re lucky! You remember the dinosaurs.”

“You’re famous! You’re the before photo in a men’s fitness magazine.”

On the latter – hmph. I’m a man of steel, and have the blood results to prove it. On the former? Well, yes, I’ve kicked around a lot longer than my 12-year-old know-it-all, and it IS true that back in the day, getting published involved this:

Step 1                  Write an excellent book

Step 2                  Buy a physical (!) directory of agents. Pick some names at random.

Step 3                  Send a submission pack out. Wait. Then either win or lose

There was not meaningfully a self-pub option. There was no meaningful self-pub option.” Absolutely no one thought I should have a Twitter profile or a website or anything of the sort. My job description was: Write good books and (a long, long way short of that requirement) Be available for 2 weeks of publicity around launch, though even then most books got no publicity at all, so for a lot of authors, that requirement was rather easily met.

And these days?

Well, the list of requirements can seem endless.

Twitter. Insta. Facebook. BookTok.

Mailing lists, reader magnets, Bookfunnel, autoresponders.

Marketing plans.

If you’re self-pubbing, then the list gets more extensive yet. Facebook ads. Amazon ads. Amazon attribution. Canva. Dashboards. Image libraries. Promo sites. Newsletter swaps.

I’ve not even touched the edge of what people are told they ought to do.

So – and here roareth the dinosaur – what’s actually the least you can get away with? How much of this stuff is really necessary and how much is just a breathless Internet trying to eat your life?

The answer depends, of course, on whether you’re trad or self-pub, the requirements for the latter being significantly greater.

The lazy trad author

You need to write a really excellent book. No shortcuts there. Not with book #1 and never afterwards.

When you’re starting out, you are likely to want / need a course to build your skills and a manuscript assessment to develop your manuscript itself (and also for a basic reality check in terms of quality.)

Obviously, we sell those good things, so I’m hardly unbiased, but I think it’s a rare author who engages seriously with a good course or manuscript feedback who doesn’t come out much improved as a result. I’m not saying that these things are essential – just that most of you will find them very useful.

You also need a competent submission pack: a query letter to 10-12 well-chosen literary agents, a good synopsis, 10,000 (ish) words of good opening chapter.

Because the knowledge of how to do these things competently is much more widely disseminated now, I’d say the basic quality standard has certainly risen. It’s harder, these days, to get an agent with a lousy query than it was. Even so: what matters is the book. The rest of it is still not crucial.

And …?

And nothing. No Twitter account? I don’t care. No FB, no Insta, no stupid TikTok? Fine, I don’t care. Agents won’t either.

No mailing list? Well, I’d advise you to have one, but you can always do that later and it’s a good-to-have. It’s not essential. It’s certainly not something you need

Website? Well, yes, you should probably have one, but I don’t care if it’s one page long and not very informative. If you spend one afternoon on Squarespace, you’ll do fine.

Yes, publishers would love you to have a YouTube channel with 1,000,000+ views in the last year, but who cares? What matters is the book, the book, the book, the book. It’s not really a secret that lots of authors are introverts who love marketing as much as they love pushing plastic picnic forks into their toes, and publishers are happy to work with said introverts. It’s the book that matters.

These days, honestly, the chores facing the Modern Lazy Author (Trad variety) are not really more onerous than they were 20+ years ago.

The Somewhat Lazy Indie Author

You can’t actually be a lazy indie author – or, rather, you can: you’ll just be one with rather modest book sales.

So the things you need to look after are:

A splendid book. You can’t sell rubbish. The book still matters most, most, most.

A copy edit. I don’t mind if you seek out low budget options (a very picky friend, for example), but you can’t sell a badly edited book these days. I do honestly think that a manuscript assessment will help almost any first time indie author, simply because quality is the overwhelming objective here

A book cover: hire a pro. Spend what you need. Fuss over this. Get it right.

A website: keying off that book cover in terms of look and with a really good, functional newsletter signup page. Again, half a day on a popular website builder is plenty.

A mailing list. You can’t not do this. You need a reader magnet, a mailing list provider (I suggest MailerLite) and a delivery service (Bookfunnel; there’s no real contest here.)

Use of book promo sites around launch. This is simple. An hour or two is all you need.

A Facebook author page. I don’t mind much how inert it is. Busy and popular is better, of course, but I don’t bother and I do fine.

Facebook ads that work. Setting your system up takes time, but after that simply monitoring those ads should take only about an hour a week. Less is actually more here: too much tinkering will impair, not improve, performance.

Amazon ads are, in my view, kinda optional – and they only really work when everything else is humming. So for the Lazy Author scoping out what lies immediately ahead, I’d say that AA isn’t something to worry about for now.

That feels like a long and arduous list, but you note that I don’t ask you to engage with social media at all (except via ads.) And most of that list involves set-up chores, not maintenance chores. If you want to maintain that lot with 1 hour a week (Facebook) + 3 hours a month (mailing list) + 2 weeks of work around launch, then that’s genuinely plenty. Write a great book, then write another and another and another. Keep the marketing stuff low demand. That’s a plan that works just fine.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Opening page

OK, an oldie but a goodie.

First 250-300 words of your book please. Minimal intro about what we’re about to read. (Give us a title and a genre, but nothing else.) When we read this opening, I want feedbackers to put themselves in the place of an agent. Your questions are: “Would I read more of this? Am I excited? Do I feel this writer has authority, that I trust them to tell this story?”

That’s the mission. Any questions? No? Then go for it. Post in Townhouse here.

Til soon.

Harry

I’ve been in the novel game for over twenty years now and let me tell you – times are tough. New writers and veterans alike are saying the same, whether they’re meeting for real-life lattes or virtual hugs: 

It’s never felt quite this brutal. 

Hooky new pitches get ignored, deals take months to finalise or are withdrawn at the last moment, publication and payments are delayed. And, worst of all, everyone seems to be ghosting each other. 

And yet… and yet, the knockout deals are still being done – and often it’s the debut writers, with no patchy sales records to put off agents or publishers – who are hitting the book trade headlines. 

But how many talented writers give up before getting to the deal stage, because the silence has ground them down? Or hear from friends about how tough it is, and decide not to submit at all? 

And how do you hold onto the passion that first drove you to write? As someone who has faced this as an author myself – and helped many writers to overcome the hurdles to get published, here are my GHOSTS golden rules for overcoming rejection (and its even meaner cousin, total indifference).

Gamify

if you reward yourself for taking more steps or eating more veg, approach querying in the same way. Focus not on finding the dream agent – who might be busy, or ill, or just plain rude – but on the numbers. Imagine there’s an app (maybe you want to make one) giving you rewards at 10, 50, 100 rejections – work out what the rewards are and look forward to reaching each milestone. 

Helicopter view

The ghosting is not about you. Zoom out and you’ll be able to see the context here – fewer editors are handling more books so they’re under more pressure. Even the best agents are being ghosted themselves. Concerns about AI, book piracy and shrinking profits make the snail-like publishing world even more glacial. 

Experienced authors like me – I was first published in 2003 – have seen how a previously polite industry doesn’t have time for ‘good’ manners. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe not. But as authors we have to adapt our mindset to keep our sanity. Part of that is about keeping informed about the industry – knowledge is power. 

Obsess

Obsess about your work, not their response (or lack of it): you can’t control their reactions, any more than you can persuade someone to date you if they don’t feel that spark. But what you can do is present yourself and your query in the most captivating way possible. So every time you do a new pitch, aim to improve the hook, or ensure the opening chapters are designed to make the reader – in this case, your potential agent – need to know what happens next. Obsess over everything from the email subject – and whether your book’s title could be even stronger – to the comps and sign-off.    

I’ve had a couple of emails recently that I think have deserved a wider response. Here’s one:

“Please could you possibly say a little more about why the first example is ‘orrible and the second is OK. When does dialect become patronising? It’s a tricky thing to get right.”

And good: this is a good question, not least because these issues have become excessively fraught.

So here is an example of transcribing a character’s voice in a patronising way:

“Eet eez ’orrible to ’ear ze proud Frensh race beleettled in zis stooped manner.”

But what the character involved has actually said here is:

“It is horrible to hear the proud French race belittled in this stupid manner.”

The first sentence, by transcribing its pronunciations in a very literal way, makes the speaker come across as ludicrous – cartoony, a circus clown with a striped jumper, a string of onions and a comical moustache. But what’s actually comical? The sentence itself displays perfect command of English, and what’s being apparently laughed at here is an accent, over which the speaker has very little control.

And, golly gosh, that’s a slippery slope.

Most people writing a non-English character in this way will (if English) speak roughly RP, or Received Pronunciation – in effect, roughly what a BBC newsreader used to sound like. In the US, it’s much the same thing, except that the reference dialect is Standard American English.

(And, please note, in RP English, we say “She placed the glahss on the grahss next to her great big – handbag.” But we wouldn’t even conceive of inserting the letter H into the two italicised words to mark the weird pronunciation. Nor do we adjust the spelling to take care of the flat “a” sound in American and North-British versions of those words. So when it comes to our weird pronunciations, we don’t even think of trying to reflect them in spelling.)

And of course, as soon as you start to accord any kind of typographic privilege to a particular accent – whether RP or SAE – you get into all sorts of bother.

It’s one thing to have a comical Frenchman – France is a nuclear power and can look after itself – but do you really want to apply the same diminishing treatment to, say, a black resident of Harlem? Or a Scouser? Or a northern woman of Pakistani heritage? Or a Mexican immigrant?

The answer, if you haven’t already figured it out is, No, certainly not. Don’t go there. Step away from the quirky spellings.

That’s partly because of a perfectly legitimate anxiety about racism.

But it’s also just a recognition of modern linguistics. The RP / SAE dialects are simply two dialects amongst many, many others. They don’t come with a halo over them that says, “the king/President speaks this way, so this version is right and everything else is wrong.” The fact is that we all speak the dialect of our culture and each dialect has no more or less validity than the next.

That’s not just true of pronunciation. It’s true of grammar too. Any significant dialect has its own grammar, which may differ from SAE / RP grammar (which, by the way, each differ from each other.) So African-American Vernacular English has its own strict rules of grammar, that are just different from SAE – and not just different, but with subtleties that SAE struggles to cope with. SAE has four basic past tenses: I did buy it, I have bought it, I bought it, I had bought it. AAVE has five, but differently structured: I been bought it, I bought it, I done bought it, I did buy it, I do buy it.

What does all this tell us?

It tells us (duh!) that other people may speak differently from us.

It tells us (duh!) that it’s not respectful or, in fact, linguistically accurate, to privilege one set of accents or grammars over another.

And that means that the solution for a novelist is quite easy:

1. Don’t try to capture nuances of accent in the way you transcribe speech. We don’t write “grahss” if we try to capture how the king of England speaks. We don’t write “eet eez ’orrible” if we try to capture how President Macron expresses himself.
2. Do use the actual words that your character uses. President Macron is probably more likely than the rest of us to use the word voila even when speaking English. And if he says it, that’s what you write. Likewise, if a Black American character says finna (a contraction of fixing to or going to) then that’s the word you write down. It IS a word; it just isn’t an SAE / RP word. Don’t patronise your characters by editing their speech.
3. Do use the grammar that your character adopts. So if your character is African-American, she might say ‘I done bought it’, in which case you write, ‘I done bought it.’
4. For that matter, most of us are perfectly adept at code-shifting, so that same character might speak using AAVE when at home with her mother, but might use SAE when (say) running for President of the United States. And if your character code-shifts, you code-shift right along with her.
5. The same goes for English spoken as a second language. Let’s say your novel features a top French footballer, who possibly now plays for Real Madrid. Perhaps that footballer says, “I do not chase after the records.” No native English speaker would naturally put the word “the” into that sentence, and nearly all English footballers would say “don’t” rather than “do not.” So you don’t need to do anything as condescending as write “Eet ees ’orrible” in order to hear the Frenchness in the speaker. You just have a careful ear for those non-native uses and let the reader intuit the rest. They definitely will.

I think the only time this is liable to get complicated is in relation to languages that are highly related to English, but aren’t actually English.

A lot of you will have encountered the broad Yorkshire speech of Wuthering Heights. This for example:

'What are ye for?' he shouted. 'T' maister's down i' t' fowld. Go round by th' end o' t' laith, if ye went to spake to him.’

Would that be better with “the master’s down in the fold”? And well – I don’t know. You can call it both ways. The modern tendency would be to eliminate some of the non-standard spelling, but in Bronte’s day, the fact was that broad Yorkshire dialect (“Tyke”) was pretty much a language to itself, related to English in much the same way as Robert Burns’ Scots is. In which case – honour the language. Give it leg room. That’s what I chose to do with my Orcadian sailor, Caff, and deliberately wrote a version of Orcadian that was damn close to impenetrable to an ordinary reader.

And if you want to do that then, (a) have fun! It’s really entertaining. And (b) get it right. I don’t speak Orcadian, I’m not Scottish, and I’ve never been to the Orkneys. So I did the best that I could with books and online resources … then wrote to the editor of an Orkney newspaper and asked for her help. She was very happy to give that to me, and I was very happy to receive it, and my readers have the joy of having a little bit more Orcadian in their lives: something we all need.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Non-standard speech

Before the task, I need to say that, in recent weeks I’ve been more remote from lovely Feedback Friday (FF) than I’d like to have been. That’s because of some tedious but time-consuming life nonsense that – I trow and I trust – is now mostly behind me. So, I’ll be getting back to FF with more vigour in the coming weeks.

And this week? Let’s just take a look at any chunk of text where you have a character speaking in a non-RP/SAE way. So that could be a regional or other dialect. Or it could be a non-native speaker. Or someone with cognitive difficulties. Or a talking animal. Or a professor in a kids book gabbling at a mile-a-minute. When you're ready, log in to our shiny new Townhouse and post yours here.

Dig out your chunks, and let’s have a look, innit?

Til soon.

Harry

Hi, I’m Laina, and I write historical fiction as L M West. I’d been researching a woman accused of witchcraft here in Suffolk in 1645, and was just wondering what to do with everything I’d found out when lockdown hit. I’d thought of writing a leaflet for our local museum, but everything was on hold. So I thought I’d have a go at writing a novel: a childhood dream!

I was 66 years old, with no idea where to start – just a story in my head. I enrolled for two short online courses with Curtis Brown Creative, and at the same time joined Jericho Writers and watched a lot of their ‘How to’ videos. All this was invaluable, but when my first book was written, I had to decide what to do.

I’d assumed I’d take the traditional publishing route, but the more I read about that, the more I realised it was not for me. I didn’t want the pressure of deadlines, possible title changes, major editorial changes and someone else doing the cover art.

I watched all the Jericho Writers videos on self-publishing, which helped me to understand that it’s not for the faint-hearted. There is a huge amount to learn, particularly about things like layout, formatting, cover design and editing. Naively, I thought that writing a book was the hardest bit – how wrong I was!

Four years later, I have self-published four novels. The fifth is being edited at the moment. My books sell steadily, and I am very happy with my chosen path to publication. I sometimes wish I could hand the novels over to someone else and let them sort them out, but I get a huge sense of achievement and satisfaction from doing it myself.

Based on my experiences so far, here are my top tips for anyone else considering self-publishing.

Be realistic #1 - If you are not tech-savvy, it will make life harder.

You may need help, and you will have to pay for this.

Get your book professionally formatted.

You can employ people to do it for you, but I compared costs and decided to invest in Vellum. I’ve been very pleased with it. You put a Word file into it, and it sorts the layout for you. It was expensive, but I worked out that if I wrote two or more books, I’d have recouped the cost. I’m now quids in!

This is the big one...

Get a professional editorial report.

You need it, your book needs it, and your readers will thank you for it. I have used Jericho Writers editorial services for every book I’ve written, and they’ve been invaluable. It can be gutting – my first report suggested that I lose the first fifteen chapters of my novel as the action didn’t get started until chapter sixteen! I cried, threatened to give up, swore I was no good at writing, that it had all been a waste of time… but I came back to it a month later, chopped off the initial chapters as suggested, and started from there. And you know what? My editor was absolutely right! It was a much better book for it.

Interested in self-publishing your own novel? Then don't miss your chance to apply for this autumn's Simply Self-Publish course! Taught by indie expert Debbie Young, it offers a comprehensive guide to preparing your work for publication, building your author brand and marketing your books successfully.

Dialogue is one of the most important components of almost any novel. It performs a variety of vital functions, illuminating character, adding pace and driving plot – but writing it badly is one of the quickest ways to pull readers right out of your story.  

By badly, I mean inauthentically. Unrealistically. Writing dialogue that sounds nothing like real speech (or is simply not believable – on which more, later) is sure to inspire head-scratching at least, and wholesale abandonment of your novel at worst.  

So, here are five tips for making sure your characters’ speech truly sparkles.  

1. Mimic real speech patterns  

Engage in a little active listening. By which I mean, go to your local coffee shop, supermarket or pub and… eavesdrop a bit. Pay attention to how real people talk, and you’ll quickly notice that speech is full of uncertainty, informalities and interruptions. People frequently forget what they’re saying and drift wildly off topic. They also allow emotions to overtake their ideas, often becoming less articulate as their feelings heighten.  

You need to replicate this in your writing. While your characters should probably be more eloquent and less meandering than the average Tesco shopper (I’ll explain why in a minute), they also need to sound human.  

Consider the difference between one old friend asking another “Would you like a cup of tea?” or “D’you want a cuppa?” To me, the second feels far more natural.  

Using contractions is a key way to ensure your dialogue comes off as authentic (assuming you’re writing contemporary characters). True fact: I once abandoned a book I was partway through because every time a character should have said ‘don’t’, they said ‘do not’. It drove me to distraction. 

Also, think about how different the following exchange would be if the two characters I’ve invented for it were taking polite turns to speak, instead of cutting across one another:  

“That was a step too far, Alison.”  

“Too far? Rubbish. I didn’t go far enough.”  

“Careful, or you’ll leave me no choice but to – ” 

“Fire me? You can’t. I quit!”  

“Now see here, you can’t just – ” 

“Goodbye, Roger. And good luck. I think you’ll need it.” 

This back-of-an-envelope example hopefully demonstrates the point. Even with no dialogue tags or description, the rhythm of the conversation makes clear the power balance between these two people has just shifted. Alison is no longer prepared to put up with Roger’s nonsense, whatever it may be. Good for her, I say.  

2. Strike a sensible balance 

On the other hand, you can make your dialogue too realistic. If your characters spoke in precisely the way real people do, they’d bore your readers to tears. On the page, the sort of small talk most of us regularly engage in falls utterly flat – so avoid writing pointless chit-chat. 

You can’t afford to include speech that doesn’t advance your readers’ understanding of your characters, help you establish setting or propel your plot. Craft dialogue that’s articulate and efficient enough to deliver against one of these objectives, but not so perfect it feels jarring or too on-the-nose.  

3. Consider context 

If you’re the right age to have watched the TV show Dawson’s Creek, you’ll remember the furore around its dialogue, too. The criticism thrown at its writers was that they had a crop of teenagers striding around Massachusetts using the sort of vocabulary you’d expect from mid-lifers with English Literature PhDs. It was derided as unrealistic, though that didn’t stop me tuning in… 

We just spent a couple of weeks with Kurt Vonnegut and an irascible Elmore Leonard. I was going to keep the series going with lists of rules from other writers, but I couldn't quite find a list that had enough grit to feel substantial.

So instead of a one-author list, here are some suggested rules or bits of advice from a Hotch-Potch of Writing Genius.

Before that:

DON'T FORGET!

The deadline for applications to the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme / Novel Writing Course is 7 September. If you have even a part-interest in doing one of these courses, then get your application in now and book a call so you can chat to one of our team about your writing and whether it's the right next step for you. We won’t pressure you to buy anything. That call is just an opportunity to de-mystify the course and figure out if it will work for you. Getting your application in before the deadline means you won't miss out, if it is your best option.

Raymond Chandler: "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."

I admire RC hugely: I think he’s one of the great American writers who (as I like to point out) was also a great English one – he was educated at the same public school as PG Wodehouse.

Now, on the one hand, Chandler wasn’t being serious. He was talking about the pulp fiction industry in America, where he cut his teeth, and which did not greatly concern itself with seriousness of purpose.

That said, action matters. Decisive plot twists matter. They propel a story. That’s obviously true of genre, but it’s true of decent literary fiction, too (though a plot twist here may be less obviously material than a man with a gun.) And if a story is stalling, then throwing in a major plot development? Good advice, always.

Michael Moorcock: "My first rule was given to me by T.H. White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies, and was: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else, from Bunyan to Byatt."

I think this is really good advice. I do think that authors need to know the terrain of their genre pretty well, but I think that limiting yourself to that genre is a mistake. The more widely you read – across genres, across time and across nations – the more your head will fill with possibility.

That also says that it’s more important to read lots of authors than it is to read lots of books. If you read one Patricia Cornwell novel, you’ll probably learn almost as much from it as if you read 20. Read twenty different authors instead, and make sure that one is French, and one Japanese, and one Egyptian, and one has been dead for 200 years, and so on.

P.D. James: "Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary, the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it."

That sounds like a good wholemeal-loaf type rule. Not exciting, but you know it’s good for you. But – I don’t really agree with it. I think you know enough words. But do you use them?

When did you last use any of the following words in your writing?

Honeysuckle | friable | acolyte | steeple | vertiginous | ammonite | curio | trepidation

You know all of those words. But it’s easy when talking about lovely summer scented flowers to say just “lovely summer scented flowers”, or perhaps to get as far as thinking about roses and lavender. It’s easy when thinking about something with a flat spiral structure to use the term “a flat spiral”. But wouldn’t those thoughts be better extended by using the terms honeysuckle and ammonite? Not every time, of course, but sometimes?

So: you don’t need to add to your word hoard. Just use the damn hoard.

Zadie Smith: "Don't romanticise your 'vocation'. You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle'. All that matters is what you leave on the page."

Damn right. Don’t be precious.

You don’t need to write with a fountain pen in a notebook covered in black silk. You don’t need to wear a kimono. It doesn’t matter if your upstairs neighbour plays horrible music. I don’t care if you don’t have the table you wanted in your local coffee shop.

Write.

Put down sentences, as mediocre as you like, then shape them up so they work. Then move on to the next one. Make sure your book holds the reader’s interest. Then go again.

Billy Wilder (screenwriter): "A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever." And another rule: "In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they're seeing."

Yes! Let the audience do the work. If you do summarise something, do so after the reader has already figured it out, so you’re consolidating an understanding, not creating it.

And obviously, we don’t have voice-overs exactly in novels, but we do sort of, when an interior monologue comments on the action just described. So be additive always.

The real point here is that nothing engages the reader as much as the detective work of figuring out implication from sub-text. Why would so and so say that to thingamajig? Why use that word? Why actually did that coffee cup get broken? It’s those tiny questions that keep a reader glued to your book. Character and plot and setting and dialogue are all just tools to create a really strong adhesion.

Feedback Friday / Your rules

Go on then: your rules of writing. Maximum of ten. And fewer than three? Bah, you aren’t trying. What works for you? What have you learned? You’re welcome to include rules that apply to editing, agents, publishing and all that. When you're ready, log in to our shiny new Townhouse and post yours here.

Til soon.

Harry

Last week, we sat down with Kurt Vonnegut and talked rules for writing. He smoked a lot and cracked pistachios, and there was a little green pistachio chip stuck in his moustache during our discussion of rules 4-7, but we had a good time. My hangover the next day … not so good.

Today, I report on my chat with Elmore Leonard who, to my surprise, spent much of our dialogue wandering around in the costume of an 1812-era naval commander and roaring things like, “Make it so, Mr Webb” and growling about an ill-set mainsail. I had no hangover after that, but my hands did smell of burned gunpowder for some days after.

El’s rules of writing are:

1. Never open a book with weather

Phooey. That’s silly. Open a book with weather if you want to. I did once, just to annoy him. Take a look at the email subject line if you want to guess what I wrote.

But – purposeful. Writing about weather can’t be just a way to write yourself into the book. There has to be purpose to it. Purpose to everything always.

2. Avoid prologues

Well, yes–ish.

I think there are roughly two kinds of prologue. One is just an apology for a boring opening. So you have a battle scene by way of prologue that basically says to the reader, “Please stick with me over the next 50 pages, because there will be something exciting to follow, I promise.” I have once written a prologue rather like this and for roughly that reason. Big El thundered at me for that one, and promised a ‘carronade of grapeshot’ if I should do it again.

But the other sort of prologue is one that changes the meaning of the text the reader is about to read. A classic example here is from Donna Tartt’s A Secret History, where the narrator reveals a murder that hasn’t yet taken place. That means the next 100-odd pages are spent thinking, ‘How does this group of friends collapse to the point at which it murders one of its number?” The book became a Whydunnit, not a Whodunnit.

Even Big El let that one go without a threat of being fired on.

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue

El, honestly? I mean, yes, mostly use ‘said’, I agree. But ‘never’? That’s absurd. So, here’s a bit of Fiona dialogue where I twice use words other than say:

‘Tea for two,’ I tell the waitress.

She asks if we want anything to eat.

‘What do you want, sweetheart?’ I ask my companion, but don’t expect, or get, an answer. ‘A bacon roll, maybe,’ I say to the waitress. ‘That’d be good.’

It’s ridiculous to suggest either of those verbs feels wrong or wordy or out of place.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.

And OK, now this is silly. I just checked one of my books and – well, I hardly ever use an adverb, but I did find this:

Aaron removes my hotel from Caernarfon. ‘You can’t put a hotel there,’ he says, with an edge of impatience. ‘You’ve got to get the property first.’

And this:

Coad’s face undergoes another change or two. Shadows chasing over ocean.

He says softly, ‘Because they’re not crazy. And I am. You want to know what I think.’

Now, to be fair, I searched the word “says”, and I started at the beginning, and these were the first examples I found, and the second of them (the first true breach of EL’s rule) was 44,000 words in.

So do I breach that rule often? No. Is it fine to breach it occasionally? Of course.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose

Ha! I thought I was going to agree with that one, but I don’t, or not quite the way Elmore’s telling it here.

In the same 109,000 word novel I’ve been checking, I found 15 exclamation points. All of those were in dialogue – things like “Duh!” or “Fuck’s sake!” Those things would I think have been just plain mispunctuated without an exclamation point. But outside dialogue? I essentially never use an exclamation point. Two or three per 100K words sounds excessive to me. But inside dialogue? And if the punctuation is there simply to note a manner of speaking rather than as a way to ‘create’ drama? Well, just use them. No one dies.

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."

I have definitely never used the phrase ‘all hell broke’ loose in one of my books. I don’t need to check them to know that.

But suddenly? Poor old suddenly? What’s wrong with it. Here’s an example from the same book that involves (sorry) Crime Scene Investigators trying to get an internal body temperature from a heavily frozen corpse:

In the end, the CSIs got a power-drill with a 10-mil bit and drove it through Rheon’s frozen back. By the look of it, they had to push through about an inch of frozen crust before getting to the tissue below. When the bit suddenly slid into the soft viscera, a splatter of blood and bowel contents spurted out, hitting the CSI across goggles and paper suit. He swore. I laughed. Watkins looked angry and impatient, which is probably just her way of laughing.

Now that’s not a way to add fake drama to a scene. It’s just a way to explain the movement of a drill bit that moved first slow, then fast. The word is perfectly OK.

That’s now four rules which are basically silly and the two before that were dubious. What does that teach us? Well, that a genuinely great writer may end up saying some slightly silly things when paid to write a column for the New York Times. That doesn’t make him less of a writer, though.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

This is true. There’s a modern tact here, which works well. Accents shouldn’t be denoted phonetically (So “Eet ees ’orrible, no?” sounds, today, like an incredibly patronising and diminishing way to write French-accented speech, for example.) But that’s about the phonetic transcription of an accent.

But if you have a character who uses regional dialect – then what is that character meant to speak other than that dialect? I had a character, Caff, a sailor who was born and bred on the Orkney Isles. I had him speak Orcadian, which is like a deep Scottish mixed with Viking and left to simmer for 1000 years. So we had chunks of speech like this:

That [turning the ship] sounds straightforward enough but Caff, who explains all this, is clearly anxious about the manoeuvre. ‘Thoo dohnt wahnt tae be skelp while turning,’ he says, as his hands show a big wave hitting the ship side-on as it turns. ‘If tha’ happens, we’ll hae oor bahookie in th’ sky in twa shakes o’ a hoor’s fud.’

I’m not going to translate that because there’s language there to make a matron’s ears blush rosy pink, but if you want a regional dialect, then use a damn regional dialect. Just honour it, and don’t patronise it.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters

Hmm. Well, I think that’s a little evasive, isn’t it? Any worthwhile description of anything finds its substance in the detail. So if I say, “She was five foot six, with dark shoulder length hair, and looked to be in her thirties,” I’ve given you three data points that amount to almost nothing.

But if I mention her “whatever-you-want smile” and say nothing about height or hair colour, you already have something – because of the detail. So maybe Leonard is saying, “Don’t just yammer on forever about how someone looks”, and OK, that’s true – but you shouldn’t yammer on forever about anything.

Here’s a wee passage with two ultra-brief character descriptions that do use details but don’t yammer on. Both micro-descriptions are just fine:

[Julie-Ann says,] “Then, I wasn’t sure, did you want to see Mr Coad?’

Mr Coad.

War hero. Nutjob. Prisoner.

No, I do not want to see Mr Coad. I want to get the fuck out of here and to never come back.

I don’t say anything.

Julie-Ann hovers, a whatever-you-want smile fixed in place.

I don’t even know how people like that maintain those smiles, those attitudes. I mean, I’m perfectly able to make nice with people, but if I offer them something – coffee or tea? do you want to see Jared Coad, yes or no? – I sort of expect them to make up their minds. I won’t just offer that wide, bland, take-as-long-as-you-want smile and keep it there.

I stare. Keep staring. And, when even J-A’s confidence starts to wobble, say, ‘Yes. Please. Jared Coad. Great.’

Julie-Ann shows me a place to make tea. Takes me down to the hospital kitchen, where a youth, late teens or very early twenties, finds me a sachet of porridge. The guy has a chest broad enough to fit a Lowland ox and the sachet is tiny in his hands.

When I presented that passage to Elmore Leonard, he read intently, then looked away, then roared at a Captain of Marines to attend to his station.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

Well, c’mon, El! We’ve basically just had that rule and we didn’t think a lot of it. Just don’t yammer on. Yes, OK. We’ve got the point. Move on.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

This is the one rule that people tend to remember, as much for how it’s phrased as for what it says. And it’s a good one. But how that rule applies will vary vastly from author to author. A Sally Rooney book looks very not like an Elmore Leonard book and neither of them looks anything like a Gillian Flynn book or, come to that, like one of mine. So yes, write in a way that holds the reader, your alpha and omega, the same for El as it was for Kurt, and as it is for me, and as it is – I’m sure – for you.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Rain, full stop, new paragraph

OK – I want any passage that you like which breaks at least one of Elmore’s rules. The more you break, the more points you get. But, if Elmore is right and the passage would be better with the rule unbroken, then you lose. You LOSE, d’you hear me? Mr Leonard will give you a full broadside, with marines shooting at you from the rigging. Please post in this Townhouse forum. 

Til soon.

Harry

As tutor of Jericho’s Simply Self-Publish course and the author of nine self-published novels and many other books, you would expect me to be a passionate advocate of self-publishing. It’s worked for me!

But is the indie route right for you and your books?  Here are six important points to consider, to help you make an informed choice.

1. Ease of access

Thanks to digital technology, anyone may now self-publish a book and launch it on the global market from their own home computer or laptop. It’s probably easier than you think. All you have to do is assemble and format the component parts – the interior, the exterior cover file, and the metadata to position the book correctly in your target stores – and press the “publish” button.

Freelance specialists can be hired at affordable rates to help you create those pieces of the self-publishing jigsaw.

2. It's an author-centric process

As an indie author, you are at the heart of your publishing business – not the profit motive of a big publishing company with expensive offices to pay for and demanding shareholders to satisfy.

Instead of being the “talent” that is the starting point of a huge production line, you are the publisher, and you are your sole client. You have all the rights and responsibilities of a big publishing company – just at micro level. Thus, your needs and your book’s needs come first.

3. Speed

Traditional publishing typically takes 18 months from contract to launch – and that’s excluding the months or years it may have taken you to be offered a contract. As an indie, you are not bogged down by a big company’s slow machinations. You work at your own speed.

Once you’ve assembled the component parts (see point 1, above), your book is just one click away from going live. Then, once you’ve hit “publish” on your chosen distribution platforms, it is a matter of hours or days, not weeks or months, before your book goes on sale to your target readers around the globe.

4. Versatility

No matter how commercial or how niche your book is, self-publishing can handle it. While it’s easier to create and market books in popular genres, you can also use the indie route to publish niche books with a smaller market.

Indies even create completely new genres. Adult colouring books were an indie innovation, as was the global festive phenomenon for children that is The Elf on the Shelf.

5. Profitability

As an indie author, you’re not contributing to big publishing companies’ profits. Once you’ve covered your set-up costs, all the royalties are yours.

Indie authors earn up to 70% of the cover price of an ebook on Amazon, whereas those with traditional contracts are likely to earn no more than 25% - or, for the big sellers, if they’re really lucky, 50%. For print, indies can earn 10-20% of the cover price compared to a typical 5% for those traditionally published. 

6. Career opportunities

Once upon a time, traditional publishers would not have entertained recruiting self-published authors to their lists. These days, the best indie books are so well done, and so commercially successful, that traditional publishers actively headhunt them. This is particularly true of the new breed of digital-first publishing companies, who focus on online sales of digital formats.

That’s what happened to me: I self-published nine successful novels before Boldwood Books contracted me to write for them and licensed the rights to my backlist novels. Self-publishing is no longer binary: you can go from indie to trad or back again (if you self-publish reverted rights).

You can also be a bit of both, as I am now – I still self-publish short fiction. Thus, self-publishing doesn’t restrict your options for the future, should you wish to change track.

So what's the catch?

To be a successful indie author, you have to learn to do all of necessary parts of the process to professional standards - and avoid pitfalls and obstacles along the way. Believe me, there are plenty of sharks and charlatans out there trading off aspiring writers’ ignorance and innocence.

But the good news is: once you’ve learned how to self-publish, you’re equipped for a lasting and sustainable venture as an indie author.

Bonus benefit: you’re in great company, with thousands of authors around the world who are embracing the indie approach, including bestsellers such as LJ Ross, JD Kirk, Clare Lydon, and Hannah Lynn – all of whom were once as the same stage as you are now. As indeed was I!

So next question: how do you learn how to self-publish well? Of course, there’s a ton of information – and misinformation – available online, but how do you know what to believe? Trawling through the wheat and the chaff can be overwhelming and dispiriting – and wastes valuable writing time.

That’s why Jericho Writers asked me four years ago to launch the Simply Self Publish course – to equip aspiring writers with the skills, knowledge and confidence they need to self-publish well. You’ll finish the course with a clear plan and goals specific to YOUR books. Many of the course alumni are now published authors, some with multiple books to their names.

The Simply Self Publish course runs twice a year, from October to December and April to June. Applications are now open for this October.

If you have any questions about whether it’s right for you, why not book a 1-2-1 mentoring taster session with me for just £20? I’ll be happy to help!

Eight workshops in one week – and a whole lot of breakthroughs along the way. The Write That Draft Bootcamp has recently wrapped up, and if you were there, you’ll know it was equal parts motivating, eye-opening, and (yes) occasionally tough. If you missed it, don’t worry – grab a coffee, and I’ll walk you through the highlights.

Writer’s block: not just laziness (who knew?)

We kicked off with Becca Day, who shared the science behind why writers so often get stuck. It’s not laziness – more often, it’s our brains reacting to fear, pressure, or self-doubt. Becca opened with a quiz to help us pinpoint the root of our own blocks – whether that’s perfectionism, fear of failure or judgement, burnout and overwhelm, decision fatigue, or simply lack of clarity.

Her tips were really helpful, diving into the core issues and what we actually need. She also spoke about somatic rest before you write – just a few minutes of breathing or stretching to calm your nervous system. Don’t use it as an excuse to procrastinate! Keep it short (set a timer) and make sure it works anywhere – for example, if you have writing time in the car while picking up the kids from club on Mondays, your somatic rest could be a quick walk around the car rather than two hours of yoga.

Build your writing “emergency kit”

Next up was Lindsey Alexander, who got us thinking about what we actually need when the words won’t come. She framed it as a personal survival kit – not just the physical stuff, but what works emotionally and functionally for you.

Some of her tips included:

• Make two lists: one for what you’re saying yes to (writing, feedback, creative time) and one for what you’re saying no to (endless scrolling, extra chores, things that drain your energy).
• Keep a writing log: track when you’re productive, when you struggle, and what patterns pop up – this helps you fix blocks before they grow.
• Schedule time and breaks: block out focused writing sessions, but also build in rest. Naps, walks, or even five minutes away from the screen count.
• Rituals matter: use sensory cues to signal “writing time” to your brain – music, a candle, or yes, that “serious writer jumper” – whatever works for you.

The key takeaway? Your kit should support you emotionally (so you feel ready to write) and functionally (so you actually get the words down). Once you’ve got this in place, you’re less likely to get derailed by distractions or doubt – and more likely to keep moving forward.

Habits that don’t make you want to cry

Adrienne Dines was next, and she was all about building routines that actually… stick. She had us ask the big questions (What’s your story about? Why does it happen?), then she went practical: set tiny daily goals, get rid of distractions (your phone will survive in another room, promise), and celebrate the wins.

She even suggested mapping where you’ve got to in your story if you hit a wall. Genius, right? It’s like holding up a map when you’ve been driving in circles muttering, “but I swear the petrol station was round here somewhere…”

The Enneagram and your writing routine

Then Becca was back with a bit of fun – discovering how our Enneagram types shape the way we write. Cue lots of “oh my god, that’s so me” moments in the chat. Honestly, who knew a personality quiz could reveal why I write in frenzied bursts while someone else is scheduling neat two-hour morning slots? Weirdly accurate.

Imposter syndrome: you’re not a fraud (promise)

Rosie Fiore hit us right in the feels with her talk on creative anxiety. That voice in your head that whispers “you’re rubbish”? She basically said: everybody has it. And also: stop waiting for a permission slip to call yourself a writer. You already are one. (Cue collective sniffles and a lot of nodding emojis.)

Fast drafting vs. burnout (the tag-team duo)

Philip Womack stormed in midweek with his rallying cry:

Last week, someone suggested an email commenting on Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for writing. That seemed like a Bloody Good Idea to me, so here goes.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

That rule, I think, is bomb-proof. And, in fact, I’d make it a little stricter. I think that even high-end literary fiction has to entertain. It can’t be enough that I have a sense of having done my duty by the Gods of Literature. I need to have had fun – or have been moved – or basically just liked my experience with the book. I think entertainment is core. I’ve never knowingly broken that rule, not even writing non-fiction.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

I’ve never broken that rule either, but I think it’s probably possible to break it effectively. American Psycho is a yukky book, but it’s a work of proper genius … and its genius isn’t because  its protagonist likes home-baking, cat rescue and volunteering at church-run soup kitchens. That said, it’s not even 1% of books that can break that rule effectively. So as a general guide, I’m with you, Kurt.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every character? I don’t know. If your protagonist has a momentary interaction with a receptionist, say, then does the receptionist need obvious motivation? On the one hand, no: truly minor characters can simply fall off the table of things you have to think about. On the other hand, here’s a snippet where Fiona does in fact interact extremely briefly with a receptionist – at a modern, ultra-secure, psychiatric institution for very violent, very dangerous offenders.

The driver takes us in. Hands us over to a neat, blue-suited receptionist – Alys, to go by her fabric badge. She is almost blushingly young, a late teenager at a guess. She wears a tri-coloured scarf, like a seriously out-of-place air stewardess.

‘Inspector Rogers? Miss Griffiths? Etta is expecting you.’

The ‘Etta’ in question is, I assume Dr. Etta Gulleford, the hospital director, and the woman we’re here to see.

No badges, I think because the metal clips could make a weapon. Instead, plastic cards, like the key-cards they use in hotels.

‘Upstairs. Right on to the end. Julie-Ann will find you there.’

She does a crinkle-eyed smile at us, the sort you’d get at an upmarket spa.

There’s no obvious sense of desire there, of wanting something … but on the other hand, I think there probably IS something. She’s blushingly young. She wears a scarf like an out-of-place stewardess. And she offers Fiona a spa-quality, crinkle-eyed smile.

What does all that amount to? I think it amounts to the Alys very much wanting Fiona not to make a fuss. Not to do something that breaks the spell. And the spell is, effectively, that this place can be considered like a nice, posh, modern spa rather than a quasi-prison full of extremely dangerous men. It’s like Alys is saying – pleading – don’t call this out for what it really is.

So, OK, I’m going to go with Vonnegut on this one. Even extremely minor characters should have some kind of want, even if it’s undeclared, even if it’s trivial.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

That’s probably mostly true, but it can’t be quite literally true. I think that, in the passage I just quoted, every sentence does do one of those two things. But what about this:

We watch for a while. The gulls. The waves. The rolling print of the wind on the water. Stippling squalls that turn the sea’s smooth watercolour into something jumpy and agitated, like the surface has been rubbed with gorse.

That’s not really advancing any action and it doesn’t really tell us much about Fiona, except I suppose glancingly, in the sense that the way she expresses what she sees would be different from yours or mine. But really, the point about those lines is that they describe something – they reveal the character of a place, not a person. That’s fine with me. I expect Kurt wouldn’t have a fight with me over lines like that. I like description. It’s fine.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

Vonnegut thought a lot about short stories and I think this rule applies both to short stories and to scenes. Enter late. It’s really easy to write 200 words of intro before you get to the meat of a scene. It’s often better to start with the meat, then use just 20-30 words a few paragraphs in to explain to the reader how they got to where they now are.

But does this rule make sense for novels? Don’t think so – or at least, I don’t think that it’s especially useful. Most of my Fiona novels start with a corpse discovery. Yes, that’s as close to the end “as possible”, but really: it’s right at the start. So: useful rule for scenes. Silly rule for books.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Oh yes. Definitely. No quibbles here.

Here at Jericho, we occasionally get books that tell a story such as: middle aged woman divorces cheating husband, feels a lack of purpose, gets diagnosed with cancer, takes up pottery, makes great ceramics, meets dashing ceramicist, gets the cancer all clear.

And, yeah, OK. I mean: in an actual person’s life, that’s all bad (to start with) then heartwarming (to end with.) But we all know people with stories like that. And – readers don’t care. They want really bad stuff to happen to characters. They’re sadists. So you have to be too. That’s just how it is.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Yes. I agree with that. (It’s also, by the way, an exceptionally good rule for marketing books too. Sell hard to your ideal reader. Bore the rest. Ignore the rest.)

But I think it’s not clear enough. Who is that person? In the end, there’s only one person who matters and that’s you. Every line you write, every word choice you make, you’re just asking the question: do I like this? Or that? Which pleases me more?

So your task as a writer is to develop your tastes as far and as finely as possible. You can’t  do that in isolation from the broad sweep of contemporary writing. You have to develop your own taste with reference to what others read. But still – write to please just one person. And make it you.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Uh, Kurt? This is just BS, and he surely knew it.

I mean the cockroaches / pages thing: OK, yes, at that point, I think there is often a kind of solid inevitability in play … but not always. In one of my Fiona books, Fiona ends up clapping handcuffs on the dastardly people who tried to imprison her (in a very weird way.) That part plays out as the reader should by then expect.

But then, a Ukrainian millionaire tries to bribe her … and she (in a Fiona-y way) semi-accepts the offer.

And a girl who went missing needs to be reunited with her father, and Fiona does just that.

Both of those things make sense from what went before, but I don’t think any reader could plausibly have mapped out either scene. So, sorry, Kurt, no way. I think you were having a laugh.

Vonnegut, also said:

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

And yes, that’s true too. If you grip the reader and entertain the reader, all the other guidance is just a means to that end.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / a tri-colour scarf

I think Kurt has given us the theme for this week. What I want is an interaction between your protagonist and a really minor character – someone who has maybe a line or two of dialogue in the entire book. Let’s take a look at whether that minor character expresses some kind of want – not directly, necessarily, but in some way.

My snippet above was about 100 words in total. You can either give me a 200-ish snippet or 2x 100-worders. The ideal response will have one or two ultra short snippets, each involving a really minor character, and we'll feel some pressure of desire from that minor character, even if they say nothing about it. Please post in this Townhouse forum.

Til soon.

Harry

Last week, I wrote an email on the approximate topic of Be Proper English. I’m sure there was a writing-related theme in there somewhere, but I remember encouraging you to play football with a fractured tibia and smash home some penalties at near enough the speed of light. 

If there was a lesson in there about writing (there must have been, no?), it had to do with resilience – the single most necessary characteristic to have in an industry that is brutally hard on the people who underpin it. 

By most authorial standards, I’ve had a successful career. I’ve written bestsellers, signed movie option deals, seen a book televised, been on some significant prize shortlists, had some great reviews, sold books to a lot of countries and in a lot of languages – and given a lot of readers pleasure. But? Well, I’ve seen books fail. I’ve had to switch genres. I’ve had to wrestle with publishers. I’ve seen really promising starts collapse for reasons that essentially had nothing to do with me. 

So, resilience? Yes. It’s lesson one. (Closely allied: mastering some self-pub ju-jitsu, a great fallback if a trad career swerves off-track, as mine did in the US.) 

But also: friends. 

People always say that writing is a lonely profession, and it is / isn’t. 

It is, yes, because you don’t write in company – and you don’t want to – and that isn’t being lonely, it’s having precious creative time to yourself. 

But no, it isn’t. It’s the opposite. Authors – writers – are the most joyfully supportive bunch of humans on the planet. 

Part of the joy of writering is that sense of fellowship. I’ve been at literary festivals where my job was theoretically to mix with readers and promote my books. I used to try to do that too, except then I realised it was way more fun just to hang with authors: those I knew and those I didn’t yet know. Those weekends were always joyful. 

And online groups too. Talk to any vaguely engaged contemporary author and they’ll be part of a community that vastly matters to them. For wisdom, for laughter, for support, for advice, for just sharing moments of pain. Honestly? I love ‘n’ adore my wife, of course I do, but for that particular kind of support, those online groups have a kind of magic that nothing else can replace. 

All this because we – Jericho – haven’t done enough in the past to create a community for you. The will has been there, and the intention, but the software we were using to deliver has just not been good enough. 

All that changes, this week. 

Our community site is now fast, friendly, un-glitchy and easy to navigate. It’s a place to make friends and find beta readers, get feedback and seek advice. 

There’s a ton of free resources from us, too - no extra sign up needed. If you’re part of the community, you get all that automatically. 

If you are already signed up, then explore, explore, explore. This refreshed community could easily be one of the most important parts of your writing life. I’ve known writers for whom communities of this sort have been absolutely central to their development as writers.  

And if you’re not yet signed up? Well, duh, it’s free? What’s the worst that could happen? Probably that you get annoyed because you have to think of a password. (But you’re a writer, yes? You can think of three words, no? Egg-noose-possum. There you go. Maybe change the words, though, we can’t have everyone with possum-based passwords.) 

And what’s the best? The best is that you find one of the most joyous and most supportive groups that you’ll ever have in your life. The whole damn thing is free, y’know. 

That’s it from me. 

Feedback Friday is a celebration of you and the things you love. Come one, come all. Let’s make it a big one.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Your darlings

Give me your darlings: 200-300 words from your work in progress that you just love.

Give us the title / genre / and a 1-2 line intro to your piece. Then just show us your joy. On a beautiful new community site. 

Til soon. 

Harry 

Hello again! Welcome back to my series of insights into what it’s like to undertake the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

No sooner had I cogitated on the aspects of character last month, when along came month five with its deeply intricate topic: emotions and senses. Never let it be said that the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme doesn’t deliver on detailed information, techniques and tips, and ‘Ah! I hadn’t thought about it like that…’ moments. My brain is full, straining at its zips, like an overstuffed holiday suitcase. And, just like a packed suitcase, I’m off on yet another happy writing adventure. 

From a certain angle, however, this topic feels like home. I’m writing in literary genre, so my stories are quiet in terms of dramatic plot action, but tend to go deep into character. I’m interested in all the questions about why people feel and behave the way they do. And I’m trying really hard to get better at seeing the emotional signs, the expected reactions, the unexpected reactions and the detail of what the situational experience involves. 

In martial arts, boxing and self-defence, students are taught to watch out for micro-movements: ‘tells’ or ‘tags’ like dropping a shoulder before a punch, shifting weight before a kick – even as tiny a ‘read’ as their eyes focussing on a point on your body. All of these can telegraph what the attack might be and help to quicken your response and choice of defensive move. The work authors have to do, to portray realistic, plausible emotion and sensations, isn’t too far off what a karate practitioner needs to do (less being thrown around, obviously!) My family are used to me constantly people-watching and being asked out-of-the-blue, random questions that begin with “How would you feel if…?” or “What’s your first thought if…?”  

All of us are so normal, average and ‘everyman’ on the surface. But we’re also, all of us, having a deeply existential experience on a massive spinning rock travelling at thousands and thousands of miles per hour, whilst hurtling towards an unknowable destination. Some of that internal truth – the marvel, the passion, the love, sadness, anger, resentment, the frustration, the happiness, the joy – it leaks outwards onto our surface, in tiny tells. It is this that a writer must become adept at seeing and noting. Then, ‘all’ we have to do is write it down with precision and brevity, as judicious as a scavenging crow, as shrewd and wily as a fox. Probably the best compliment I, as an author, could ever receive would be something like: “her writing is so observant, her storytelling beautifully astute.” I’m looking forward to seeing that in print one day in one of the big-name newspapers (big hairy audacious dreams are the best sort to have!) 

With this month’s topic, I’ve been thinking about the emotions and senses of the act of writing itself, of being a writer and trying to achieve big writing goals, and I realise how fractal this topic is. It is as if I am folding in on myself when I consider how to portray characters’ emotions and senses. The whole magical alchemy of it, the macro and the micro existing on the same pin-head. Or, as the legendary figure, Hermes Trismegistus put it: as above, so below, as within, so without. I find myself writing stories of emotion and sensation in order to describe the experience of learning the skills to write stories with emotion and sensation.  

I’m attempting something in my work-in-progress that is really technically challenging for me. I’m playing against certain conventions of narrative tension and introducing slippery point-of-view perspectives – issues that may trip me up if I’m not careful. Frankly, I’ve been questioning why I’m being so reckless. The answer comes to me in the form of a story. A memory. I am aged nineteen and I’m galloping across the stubble of a harvested corn field on my chestnut gelding. There’s a big oxer of a hedge ahead of us, a wide, dark ditch at its base, and that horse of mine was infamous for dropping a shoulder half a stride out from fences and throwing me. Regardless, I gallop him towards it, pressing my heels into his sides, standing up in the stirrups, encouraging him to go, go, go. I’m counting down the strides with the thunder of his hooves as my metronome, my fingers entangled in his mane, wiry as twine against my knuckles; an attempt to fool myself I’ll be able to hold on, be safe, if something goes wrong. And the moment comes. I’m out of strides. I’ve either asked him for the right take-off point and he’ll obey, lifting, leaping, flying up and across, into the summer blue... Or I’ve misjudged it and he’ll duck out on me, throwing me down there into that black ditch of brambles.  

Did I make it to the other side of that long-ago leap? Yes, I did. 

Will I succeed with this W-i-P and the portrayal of character I’m attempting? To be decided.  

One thing’s for sure, the structure and accountability that the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme demands of me – and the ongoing support of my tutor group and my tutor, Andrew Miller (longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize with his latest book, The Land in Winter – again, huge congratulations, Teach!) – is definitely giving me the courage to kick on.  

Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

If you’ve ever tried writing a novel completely solo, you’ll know it can feel a bit like hiking up Ben Nevis in flip-flops, in thick fog. You're fuelled by blind optimism and a cereal bar, convinced the summit’s just over the next ridge—only to realise you’ve been walking in circles for three chapters. Somewhere around Chapter Five, the plot fog descends. You lose sight of where you’re going, your characters start behaving strangely, and you begin to wonder if you’d be better off running a sweet little candle shop in the Lake District.

That’s where writing friends come in.

At Jericho Writers, we speak to lots and lots of writers every year—from total beginners to published authors—and one thing comes up again and again:

“I wouldn’t have kept going without my writing friends.”

Why community matters

Writing might be a solitary act, but it’s rarely a solo journey. It takes grit, imagination, stamina… and, more often than not, a friendly nudge (or let’s be honest, a full-on shove) from someone who understands what you’re trying to do.

At our last Open Event, Q&A: The Journey to Publication, we asked course alumni of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme what they valued most. The answer? “My cohort.” The people they wrote alongside. The ones who were there for the wobbles, the rewrites, the “I’ve had a terrible idea at 3am and now I’m replotting the whole thing” moments. The late-night pep talks. The shared wins.

Because when you’re surrounded by people who get it—not just technically, but emotionally—it changes everything. The doubt, the hope, the awkwardness of calling yourself “a writer” out loud. A writing community helps you feel less alone. It keeps you going. It reminds you this odd little dream of yours? It’s worth it.

My writing friend (and how she saved my writing life)

I joined my first writing course back in 2020—mid-lockdown, when everything felt a bit upside down—and one of the best things to come out of it (aside from finally making progress on my novel) was finding a proper writing friend.

We started exchanging work during the course and just… kept going. We started swapping work. Tuesday check-ins became a thing:
“Write anything over the weekend?”
“Want to set a goal for this week?”
“This bit’s brilliant, by the way—keep going.”

Even now, years later, we still email regularly. We cheer each other on, send little nudges when one of us is stuck, and celebrate the wins—however small. Between us, we’ve juggled wedding planning, renovation chaos, job changes, life generally doing its thing… but that writing thread has always stayed.

That one friendship turned writing from something private and slightly terrifying into something shared. Something doable. I’ve never looked back.

You don’t need a massive gang. One person who gets it can be enough to change everything.

Not doing a course? You still deserve that support

Of course, not everyone’s up for a writing course right now. Maybe the timing’s not right. Maybe money’s tight. Maybe you just want to dip your toes in before diving in fully.

Which is exactly why we’ve been working behind the scenes to create something a bit special. A fresh new version of Townhouse—our free online community for writers. Think of it as your cosy corner, where you can find fellow scribblers, cheer each other on, and feel like you belong—even when you’re still figuring it all out.

The new Townhouse will give you:

• A cleaner, easier-to-use space (goodbye clunky tech)
• Faster loading and smoother navigation
• Better access to courses, resources, and events
• Dedicated spaces for feedback, accountability, genre chats, and more

Whether you’re still flirting with Chapter One or knee-deep in edits, Townhouse is the place to meet writing friends, stay motivated, and remind yourself that you’re not the only one trying to wrestle a book into being.

Fancy joining us?

We go live later on this week. In the meantime, maybe have a think: who’s in your writing circle right now? Could you be the person someone else is waiting to meet?

Because honestly? You don’t need a perfect routine, a finished draft, or a publishing deal to be part of a writing community. You just need to show up.

Which football player (soccer player to those of you currently wearing Stetsons and/or a shoestring necktie) has never started an international knockout match but has twice scored the decisive goal in the finals?

If you’re Welsh or Scottish, you probably know the answer and wished you didn’t.

If you’re English – well, it’s Chloe Kelly, isn’t it? She didn’t just score the decisive penalty against Spain in this year’s Euros, she also scored the decisive goal against Germany in the 2021/22 edition. She also set up Russo’s equaliser in last weekend’s final, scored a 119^th minute equaliser against Italy, set up both goals against Sweden … and yes, scored a penalty there too.

That’s a never-say-die record to put it mildly, but Chloe Kelly doesn’t even take the record for most never-say-die in the English team.

That accolade surely has to go to Lucy Bronze who played a full part in every game in the tournament – which is a FOOTBALL tournament, which involves a game that requires people to (a) run and (b) kick and also, if we’re honest, (c) be kicked – and Bronze did so while having a fractured tibia. Now yes, the fracture was a stress-fracture, so it’s not like the bottom part of her leg was just flopping around like a broken chair leg. But stress fractures are very painful and the recommended treatment does not involve playing constant high-level football.

The unofficial motto of the team has come to be Proper England, or Proper English.

What does that mean? Well, it means be more Kelly. It means, be more Bronze.

By most football metrics, Spain had the better of Sunday’s final.

They had more of the ball. Had silkier players. Connected more passes. Showed those little dabs of skill.

But resistance is a skill too. If Spain were masters of control, England were masters of chaos – and sheer bloody-mindedness. Was there somewhere in the multiverse, some spinning galaxy somewhere in which Chloe Kelly did not set up that equalising goal? Did not lash that final ball through the net and into the stands beyond? I doubt it.

And all this is a homily about writing.

Writing is a Really Hard Job.

It’s hard to write a book.

It’s hard to get an agent.

It’s uncertain, having once got an agent, that you get a publisher.

And when you get a publisher – well, guess what? Most books fail and publishers are absolutely experts at brushing you ever so politely and ever so decisively out of their lives.

So, OK, damn publishers. Why not self-publish? Well, sure thing. Except now you need to write a lot of books. And they need to be good books. And the covers need to be as good as books commercially published by billion-dollar corporations, because they’re competing nose to nose against those books. And you’re going to have set up mailing lists. And Facebook ads. And probably Amazon ads. And you’re going to have to layer those things up and be as professional about those things as you are about everything else. And all that, honestly, won’t work unless your books compel the reader, which, as we know, ain’t the simplest.

So?

Either give up, which is a perfectly sensible solution. Accountancy is easier and it’s definitely better paid.

Or – be Proper English. (Or, proper Welsh / Scottish / Irish / American or whatever descriptor pleases you.)

Just refuse to be beaten.

In the Italian semi-final, England scored the equalising goal in the fifth minute of second-half injury time. They scored the winning goal in the penultimate minute of extra time.

Book’s rejected by agents? Write it better.

Still rejected? Write a new book. Use all the learnings from the last one.

Taken one course? Take another.

Tried five agents? Try five more.

Your rom-coms didn’t work? Write crime.

Trad publishing stopped feeling right? Self-publish.

Unsure about Facebook ads? Learn about Facebook ads.

There definitely are authors whose first book just bounces to the upper reaches of the bestseller charts, there to establish a nesting place for all its future sisters, but those authors are desperately rare: exceptions among exceptions.

One of my favourite keynote talks at our Festival of Writing was given by a bestselling author, who was also a senior commissioning editor at a Big 5 publishing house. She knew everybody. She was crazily well-connected. Her first book became a #1 bestseller. And (I was worried) that our audience just wouldn’t relate. Just like it wouldn’t relate to Jeff Bezos moaning about the price of fuel for his yacht.

But the speaker turned it around.

She corrected me. “Harry, when you introduced me just now, you said that my first novel went straight to the top of the charts. And it didn’t. What you meant was, my first published novel …”

And this glittering writer, this gifted person who sat at the heart of London’s publishing industry, had written an earlier book. Which she spent ages on. Which was never published. Which an agent-friend/colleague told her was too bad even to market.

Every the glitterati have tough times. This is a tough game.

Get back on that fractured tibia – and be more Bronze. Be more Kelly. The game ain’t over till it’s over.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Explanations

No Feedback Friday this week, because Townhouse is on holiday. (Or actually, so hungover after its personal Euros celebrations that it has a headache that stretches from here to Paris. It also has straw in its hair, sand on its bum, what seems to be a Russian sailor in the bedroom, and a quite extraordinary new tattoo. Townhouse promises to sober up – and get rid of the sailor – in time for next week.)

Til soon.

Harry

Last week, I wrote about elevator pitch (yet again). I said (again) that your One True Pitch has a hundred daughters, and some of those daughters are visual.

Your book cover is the most obvious example, but Facebook ads would be another one. And whereas you only get one book cover, you can have a zillion FB ads if you want to (and, erm, if you’re self-publishing. FB ads are a niche that only work for indie authors.) What’s more, those FB ads give you hard numerical data on what works and what doesn’t – and part of my email last week suggested that if the elevator pitch isn’t properly expressed in the image, then it won’t ultimately succeed in terms of sales.

I’d say that, on the whole, my data bears that out. (And some books have a much simpler way to express their elevator pitch in visual terms. Those books are easiest to advertise.) 

Now, that’s all jolly interesting but: 

1. Lots of books won’t get FB ads (because they may be trad published by publishers who focus on print sales). 

2. The success of a book is more heavily determined by a cover than by the ads: if you have a lousy cover, no marketing in the world will save the book. 

3. And the book cover is the older, more senior daughter. The look of the cover has to determine the look of any advertising campaign (and, in fact, any visual materials produced in any context), because all those visual materials have to set up the right expectations: “This is the thing we want you to buy.” 

So what works for a book cover? Well, a strong pitch, visually expressed. 

As I said last week, you can’t necessarily get the entire pitch into a visual and you don’t have to. You just have to make sure that the pitch and the image are extremely consistent. You need to feel the pitch at least partially expressed in the cover. 

And, because the most arresting element of any cover is the title, then you really want to think of the cover as being the sum of Image and Title with those two things working harmoniously with one another. 

Here’s an example of all that working p-p-p-perfectly:

The book is a big bestseller by my colleague, Becca, who's Head of Marketing and Membership at JW Towers. 

I don’t know exactly how she would frame the elevator pitch, but it’s something like: 

Woman + creepy guy + remote cabin + letters from a previous wife. 

That’s a pretty damn solid elevator pitch, and it’s right there on the cover. 

Woman? Yes, in massive text. 

Remote cabin? Yes, in massive text and as the lead element of the visual. As a matter of fact, the text ‘cabin’ could mean some kind of beach-side cabin that’s part of a group of 100 or more. This artwork makes it damn clear: this cabin is remote. It’s alone. It’s isolated. 

Creepy guy? Well, no… but also kind of yes. The man doesn’t feature in the title or in the image, but you sort of feel him there. The blue and yellow colour tones in the cover have become a kind of uniform for psychological thriller books. The creative part of me never loves a uniform… but they’re definitely a sweet and lovely guide to genre. They’re another way to convey information. And here, the blue and yellow (and the twilight), all say, “creepy domestic drama.” So yes, there’s a creepy man around here. You’d feel kind of baffled if you picked the book up and he wasn’t there in the blurb. 

Letters from the wife before? OK, this is not in big text and it’s not an element in the image. (Nor should it be: it would just look awful if there was some handwritten letters layered onto the image somehow.) But – well, you have your shoutline to play with, a subtitle, in effect. And that doesn’t mention letters, but it does strongly hint in that direction: “You’re not the first. Will you be the last?” Nine words that complete delivery of the pitch. 

The cover + image delivers the whole damn pitch, perfectly. 

Books almost never sell at real scale unless they deliver a great reader experience, so I don’t want to pull any praise away from Becca’s actual writing. (I’ve just started the book: I’m 50 pages in and loving it.) 

But Becca tells me that the publisher of this book at one stage contemplated changing the title and the cover design. The title was going to be “The Woman Before” and the image was going to be of someone washing up. 

You can kind of feel the thinking going on there. This is a domestic drama. Maybe lean on the last part of the elevator pitch more heavily, the idea that this current wife is successor to an unknown previous one? 

But Becca pushed back, and she was right to do it. The remoteness of the location was absolutely central to the pitch. If you had to trim the pitch down to three elements, not four, it would be: 

Woman + creepy guy + remote cabin.

The book sells because of teasing the reader: what would it be like to be a woman, alone in some remote place, with a guy whom you now find creepy? The previous wife just gives you a steer on the particular kind of creepiness involved, but that’s kind of secondary. Woman + creepy guy + cabin: that’s the bit that really matters. 

Oh yes: I will also say that a good book cover should stand at an oblique angle to the title. It should offer a different take, or it’s not really intriguing. 

The most obvious cover here would have been “picture of cabin with woman in window.” But then the reader learns nothing from the cover than they have from the title. Those very literal covers nearly always fall flat. 

When books of mine have failed, the cover has always been at the heart of the failure. 

Here’s the American hardcover of my first Fiona Griffiths book: 

That sort of expresses “woman uncertain of her identity”, but it doesn’t say “this is a crime novel”. It doesn’t reference murder and crime investigation and being a detective.

If you were told this was an existential novel by a French feminist philosopher, you’d probably think: (a) yep, perfect cover, and (b) I won’t buy that until the Ice Age after next. 

Sure enough, that book had stellar reviews… and terrible sales. 

Because sales had been disappointing, the publishers decided on a complete rebrand for the paperback edition. They went with this: 

(That’s a weird second-hand image, because – thank the Lord – my self-published books have now driven these original versions off the market so completely that they’ve become hard to find.) 

And that image still fails. There’s some sense of communication with the dead, yes, but in a séance-type way, not a weird-detective way. 

As a matter of fact, those cutesy suede ankle-boots suggest that what you’re looking at is some sort of women’s fiction based around séances. I mean: there probably IS a niche there, because there’s a niche for almost everything, but if you were a girly-séance sort of reader, you’d be totally put off when you found what kind of book was actually on offer. 

That book sold all across the United States and Canada… and sold fewer than a thousand copies: a figure so low I still find it staggering.  

Just because your eyes are probably hurting from the badness of those covers, here’s the self-pub version of the cover that replaced those two evildoers: 

That cover says: dark crime novel, with a theme to do with the borderline between life and death. That’s good enough: there just isn’t a visually one-stop way to express “murder story involving a detective who used to think she was dead.” 

The cover isn’t the pitch, remember: it’s the daughter of the pitch. You just need to see a strong family resemblance. 

That’s it from me. 

In Delightful Child News, I will just tell you that my elder daughter has created the most excellent word, confuzzling, for anything that is confusing and puzzling. It’s kind of a genius word, and I heartily recommend its adoption. 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY is going on holiday...

As you probably know, we'll be doing some serious tinkering with Townhouse over the next couple of weeks. Our aim is to improve it for our members, both Premium and free - but that means it'll be going offline on Monday 28 July.

Feedback Friday is glad you folks will be getting a shiny new space to connect in, not least because it means she can have a well-deserved rest.

She'll be back on 8 August, slightly sunburnt, in her snazzy new home. 

Til soon. 

Harry 

The whole Jericho Writers team agrees that, at this year’s London Festival of Writing, our Friday Night Live competition was a little bit special. For a start, it was on a Saturday – but leaving the misnomer aside, we were bowled over by the stellar standard of the entries we received.

Anyone who was in the dining room that night would surely agree that our finalists – although writing in diverse genres – had one thing in common. Their work was accomplished, affecting and intriguing.

A month on, we wanted to reflect on what made our entrants’ best work so impressive and look at some of the more constructive feedback our judges had to offer.

What we loved

Strong opening lines

Giving your novel a killer first line sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it’s not as simple as it might seem. Opening sentences shoulder immense pressure, often doing multiple things at once. They tell us something about our protagonist and the world they live in, hint at events that will be central to the story and strike a tone that will carry through the novel, setting up its genre and style.

We loved finalist Tori Howe’s arch, amusing line: “Our Christmas tree was definitely dead”, as well as Davina Bhanabhai’s devastating opener: “I spend my forty-fifth birthday identifying the dead body of my only child”.

Want to nail your own novel’s first line? Remember that this doesn’t have to be the bit of your book you write first! Hitting upon the perfect opening sentence is the sort of thing you might find easier to achieve in retrospect, when your draft is well underway and your characters and their world are firmly established.

Voice

What makes a strong narrative voice? It’s a question we get asked frequently, and – slightly annoyingly – the honest answer is you just know it when you read it.

Voice was something our Friday Night Live judges commented on frequently this year, highlighting the individuality and authenticity of many entrants’ writing. Sophie Holme’s entry, which made the live final, was a perfect example. Rich with wry wit, the first 500 words of her memoir are also shot through with a melancholy that hints at the darker themes her work explores – among them, the state of psychiatric care in the UK.

If you’re keen to develop your narrative voice, confidence is key. Know, right down to your bones, who your characters are, what the stakes are for them and how what happens in their world will shape them. Then you can tell their story with the sort of authority that resonates with readers – in a voice that, without needing to shout, demands their attention.

World-building... without info dumping

We had lots of fantastical, spooky and speculative entries to this year’s competition – and the best among them managed to establish the worlds their characters lived in without clumsily offloading key information. In her romantasy extract, finalist Isabel Norris made the smart move of drip-feeding just enough facts to let the reader orient themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, striking the perfect balance between providing details and provoking questions.

Friday Night Live winner Kate den Rooijen, in her speculative YA entry, achieved the same effect – allowing readers to conclude that her main character was dying at the same moment the protagonist realised this herself.

Things to think about

'Writing in'

Many of us do this, and it’s a very normal part of the writing process. For the uninitiated, ‘writing in’ is the act of producing scenes, or even whole chapters of a manuscript, whose (often unconscious) purpose is enabling you, the author, to work out who your characters are and what is going on with them.

The challenge is knowing when you’re writing in, and identifying those scenes or chapters as (gulp) potentially superfluous to the story you’re telling. Starting your novel in the right place is a skill – and to some extent it’s dependent on your ability to gauge how much ‘writing in’ content makes it into your final manuscript.

Our very best Friday Night Live entries this year boasted strong beginnings that took readers straight to the heart of action, setting, stakes and character, rather than explaining them. This is crucial for establishing a sense of pace and hooking your reader upfront.

Structure and style

We saw some Friday Night Live entries where judges praised “beautiful writing” but added that “the sentence structures chosen made it hard to follow”. In other cases, there was switching between tenses and points of view within extracts, which our judges found confusing.

Readers also said they found that, in a few cases, the genre of an entry didn’t quite tally with the style it was written in – often because the voice or narrative point of view felt jarring. It’s worth remembering that, if you’re writing a thriller, it needs to feel like a thriller from the very first page. Likewise, contemporary women’s fiction needs to open with a protagonist we can empathise with, in a setting readers will recognise. As one of today’s teenagers might put it: the vibes have to be right.

Over-writing

Finally, it’s no surprise that a small handful of our entries felt a little over-written. When you’re setting your work up to be judged, the temptation to keep embellishing it can be difficult to resist!

What is over-writing? It’s arguably a subjective concept, but it’s about using more words, more imagery and more bells and whistles than are needed. It can also be about making the same point in multiple ways when stating it simply would be more impactful.

Sometimes avoiding over-writing is about using one perfect word instead of five not-quite-right ones: getting to the heart of a feeling or experience in a way that feels true, rather than dressed up or manufactured.

Our advice? Don’t allow complex prose to obscure the point it’s supposed to be making. Ensure your words are meaningful, not just artfully arranged.

Our sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to enter this year’s competition. It was a privilege to read your work, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with next year.

Something a little different this week.

I’ve jabbered a lot in the past about the importance of nailing your elevator pitch: making sure that your basic novel concept is one that people feel the need to pick up and explore.

I think that’s not just commercially important. I think it’s artistically important too. It’s key to any genuinely great book.

I’ve also always said that the elevator pitch – that basic concept – is FOR YOU. It’s a mother with 100 daughters. The daughters arise anywhere your book concept touches the world. So, for example:

• Your query letter
• Your book blurb
• A two-line pitch on social media
• A conversation with an agent at our London Festival of Writing.

But also, for example:

• Your text itself
• Your opening page (and what it hints at in terms of the future)
• Choices you make about what and what not to include.

But also: 

• Your book cover
• Your website
• Your Twitter profile (I’m not going to call that company by a stupid name just to please an erratic billionaire)
• Your Facebook ads (ditto). 

Today, I thought it would be interesting to pick up the very last of those. Here, for example, is a Facebook ad for one of the Fiona books.

What’s the elevator pitch for that book? Well, all my pitches have two layers, I guess. There’s the series pitch (“Detective who used to think she was dead”). And there’s the individual book pitch, which in this case is something like “Dark religion + kidnap + remote Wales village”. That’s the pitch if you pick out the central ingredients. If you want a more conventional pitch, then “Woman, wearing bridal white, found dead in a country churchyard. Who is she? And why is she here?” 

I hope you feel that the image above connects adequately with the pitch. It’s not that they say the exact same thing, but they live happily together – like lemon and mint.

Nearly all my ads use the same colour set – yellow and white text, dark monochrome image – because that basic mixture says noirish crime, with strong hints of seriousness. (Yellow and black together convey danger – it’s one of the standard colour sets of warning signs and crime tape.) Also, of course, the more consistency in the ads, the more casual users start to notice the brand on repeat viewings. 

Here’s another ad for the same book: 

That’s a more direct expression of the elevator pitch, but they’re both playing on the same basic turf. At the moment, both ads have roughly the same link click-through rate, so I can’t yet say which one will come out on top. 

Or take another example, this time for the ($0.99) series opener. 

Here, the elevator pitch is all about my damaged detective – who’s kinda nuts and used to think she was dead. The ad that’s worked best so far is this one: 

The actual image there is pretty much bog-standard: tough, crimey woman + moody landscape. But the ad text tells you who that woman is: “Brilliant, quirky, damaged, fascinating.” 

Again, that’s not a direct statement of the pitch, but it’s certainly a very clear echo. It makes you want to know more… and when you get to the actual book sales page, the basic offer expands from that exact starting point. The journey from ad to book page, to “look inside”, to purchase, should all be very clear, very consistent. 

Another ad that has done well is this one: 

That ad offers a landscape – a somewhat foreboding, Welsh-looking one. That establishes genre (moody, Celtic noir, crime), but it doesn’t say much directly about the pitch. But again, “Wales’ strangest detective” slaps the elevator pitch right there, up top. 

Both those ads have done better than one that uses a really positive review as its central element. Take this ad, for example: 

That ad has done OK… but it’s not been any kind of star performer. And I think that’s because its relationship with the elevator pitch is just too murky. OK, so Fiona Griffiths stars in some crime books. We’ve never met anyone like her. But… what? She’s super-girly? She’s a klutz? She’s half-robot? She speaks Ukrainian? She mostly works as a part-time hairdresser? 

In terms of ads that really deliver readers – that is, ads that command the user’s attention from first sight through to completion of purchase – it’s been my experience that the pitch matters. That’s why your original concept matters so much, even before you’ve started to write a word. It’s why that concept matters so much when you’re selling, not just with the text you deploy, but the image composition too. 

That’s it from me, my furry companion. May the grass lie softly for you and the air taste sweet. 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY - Explanations 

Do you have any visual material for your book? If so, let’s hear your pitch and see your visuals. That’ll be fun! 

If you don’t have anything available yet (and you really don’t need to), then just give us your pitch and sketch out for us what a book cover or Facebook ad might look like.

When you're ready, log in and post yours here.

Til soon. 

Harry

Hello again! Welcome back to my series of insights into what it’s like to be part of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

This month feels like a deeply personal and challenging one: we’re spending the month covering character, in all its facets. I have a theory that this aspect of writing is where the maxim, “Write what you feel,” comes most to the fore. I see myself and my experiences in every main character I’ve ever written, to a greater or lesser extent. I hear my values in their dialogue. I recognise the resonance of my soul in theirs and, to be perfectly honest, I can’t actually imagine writing stories in any other way.  

I’m not talking about writing characters that match only my characteristics, my physical attributes, my socio-economic categorisation, my place of birth or the places I’ve chosen to live in. For instance, the two main characters in the manuscript I’m writing on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme are, respectively, a male, 60-year-old, ex-special forces vagrant with PTSD, and a 20-year-old orphaned woman, living in a Suffolk commune. Both have significant powers of clairvoyancy.  

This, to probably nobody’s surprise, is not my actual life experience. No, what I mean is that I want to populate my stories with people who connect me to the commonality we all share: the frailty, the bravery, the drag of secret shame, the lift of delicate hope, our mortality and the knowing, innate within, that at some point this life will end. Beneath everything, I believe we’re not all that different to one another.  

I have another theory that the characters who arrive for each of us writers are embodiments of a particular, and highly personal, call to romantic adventure. The types of characters that turn up for me are an embodiment of what adventure means to me. They’re configured according to what my next lesson is, my next challenge. Us writers, us artists, us humans – we’re not built for safety. I reckon we’re built for lives of progress and questing! The characters that have gathered in my imagination across the years are not mere chance or some random coincidence – they mean something to me. In pursuing them, getting to know them across the one-hundred-thousand or so words I write, as I carefully observe them, record their actions and reactions, I am changing myself. My hope is that I am skilled enough to render them accurately, such that the spirit of adventure is a shared one – recognised in the hearts and imaginations of readers.  

I asked my writer-friends how their characters came to them. They spoke of their characters becoming great friends, of feeling shy of them at first, of falling in love with them. They even spoke of writing them as a form of magical possession; of being inhabited by a spirit who wishes to be known, sketched and seen. I love that idea. 

Aren’t the best books, the ones that stay with us, comprised of characters who we recognise in some way? There's a relatability to them, their humanity playing out in ways that make it easier to identify ourselves in all our perfection and limitations. It was always a book that enabled me to put words to a particular feeling or emotion. Penny-drop moments of concentrated complexity can be delivered in a sentence or two, like a light going on: “Oh, that’s it!”  

My final theory, therefore, is that it’s only books that can deliver this straight-to-the-point, I-get-it feeling. Paintings can move, sculpture can awe, music can inspire, films can amuse. But the written story is the sharpest, truest, longest-lived art form.  

Why? Because stories feature people in close-up, specific focus (no matter what narrative/psychic distance the author wields) and, being constructed of words on a page, they require complex focus and brainwork to read. Imagination takes effort, or sustained cognitive engagement, as the men in white coats might say. For this reason alone, it behoves us writers to come up with the most compelling, intriguing, daring (in all forms of courageous thought and action) characters we can muster – as a gift to both our own growth, but also to our readers. And where else better to go so wholly into the practical aspects of your story and your characters than right here on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme?  

Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

Last week, we looked at a couple of solo flights – characters brought to life only from their dialogue or only from their interior reflection.

But that’s not mostly how stories go. Mostly, we have a point of view character through whom we meet others. So what we get is character-through-character. The reader interprets the third party character from what the point-of-view character is reporting – but that interpretation always takes into account who’s telling the story.

That all sounds slightly academic, but it’s not really – it’s normal human. Suppose I find there is chocolate cake mess all over my kitchen, and some story about a dog jumping up and scoffing it. Well, fine – but my understanding of what’s happened will depend rather a lot on whether my wife is telling the story … or a very chocolatey 6-year-old.

So here’s a chunk of action – narrated by dear old Fiona – in which she interacts with a woman named Anna Quintrell.

The scene is set in a two-custody cell in a modern custody suite. Quintrell is an accountant who’d been busted for something bad. Fiona has been working undercover, but Quintrell doesn’t know that and still thinks Fiona was part of her gang. Fiona has a visible face injury which she acquired on purpose – she wanted to look the part. She’s asked that the custody cell be made as cold as possible.

Here’s the scene, a complete (but very short) chapter:

Quintrell is brought to the cell when the light is dying.

She looks rough. Not injured and knocked about, like me, but exhausted. Defeated. She’s still in her cutesy little summer dress, but someone has given her a grey fleece to wear over the top.

We stare at each other.

She sits on her bed. There are four blankets in the room and I’ve got them all.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Resisting arrest,’ I say. ‘Except some of it happened after arrest.’

She draws her legs up on the bed. ‘Can I have my blankets?’

I give her one.

‘And another?’

I tell her to fuck off. Say I’m cold.

‘So am I.’

I shrug. Not interested.

There’s a pause. A pause sealed off by steel doors and concrete walls.

‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

I shrug.

Light dies in the ceiling.

She tries to make herself comfortable. Twitches the fleece and blanket, trying to get warm. A losing game.

There’s a call button by the door which allows prisoners to ask for help from staff. She presses it, asks for more bedclothes. Someone laughs at her and tells her to go to sleep.

She stands by my bed and says plaintively. ‘You’ve got my blanket.’

I tell her again to fuck off. She’s bigger than me, but I’m scarier. She goes back to her bed.

The light fades some more. I try to sleep. The aspirin has worn off and my head hurts. Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered. Down the corridor, we can hear more suspects being brought in and processed. Doors slam through the night: church bells calling the hour.

I sleep.

And that’s it. The scene is so simple that, in a way, there’s not much to say about it.

The central element here is the establishment of a power hierarchy. When they were both in the criminal gang, Quintrell was Fiona’s boss. She was taller, richer, more educated (she thought), more powerful. In here, though, that’s all inverted.

A cutsie summer dress is replaced by a grey fleece. The resources people fight over aren’t elegant homes (a contest where Quintrell won, but prison-issue blankets (a contest where Fiona wins 3-1.)

There are only two scraps of non-blanket related dialogue. The first is the bit about Fiona’s injury.

She tells Quintrell she was hurt once ‘resisting arrest’ – that is, she claims she fought the police who tried to arrest her. And part of the injury was after arrest, meaning that she was beaten up during interrogation. That’s not true – Fiona and the reader know it’s not true – but

1. It makes Quintrell even more scared about her situation and
2. It makes Fiona look even scarier to Quintrell, because she gets beaten up by cops and doesn’t even seem that perturbed by it.

The other non-blanket related moment is Quintrell saying, ‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

That’s Quintrell looking at total defeat – a prison sentence stretching ahead of her. But it’s also a frightened woman reaching out to someone who might be a friend. It’s a request for sympathy.

That request gets yet another shrug. So far Quintrell has received from Fiona:

1. A stare
2. A blanket
3. A ‘fuck off’
4. Two shrugs.

That’s not really much of a basis for friendship, so Quintrell who is imprisoned and cold and facing jail is now also friendless.

Nothing at all has happened in this scene, except that: ‘Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered.’

 That moment of crying is the bit Fiona has been working to achieve. In the morning, when they wake, Fiona shows a tiny bit of openness to friendship. Here’s a tiny snippet from the chapter that follows:

Quintrell trusts my legend [=undercover identity] completely now. Perhaps she did before, I don’t know, but my injuries and my presence here have washed away any last trace of suspicion.

I cover up with blankets again. Then relent and throw one over to Quintrell.

‘Thanks.’

She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and arranges it over her front. She looks like a disaster relief victim, or would do if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses with matching loafers.

‘I like your dress.’

‘Thanks.’

Silence fills the cell.

Fiona gives Quintrell a blanket and says something nice about her dress. That’s the nudge that Quintrell needs to turn all confessional. She starts spilling her heart out to Fiona … unaware that the whole thing is being recorded. She ends up incriminating herself and most of her fellow gang-members.

And throughout all this, we always learn more about Quintrell, but always through a Fiona-ish lens. A Jack Reacher type character might have noted the dress – roughly: “she wore a blue and white summer dress” – but wouldn’t have got involved with it.

A more feminine type character might have started to characterise the dress a bit more. (“A summer dress, but smart, almost nautical. A dress that wanted to hold a glass of cold white wine overlooking some sunny beachfront in the Hamptons.”)

Fiona is feminine enough to circle back to Quintrell’s clothes, but in a Fiona-ish way – ‘if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses …’

So every time we learn something about Quintrell, we also learn something about Fiona. And in fact, because Fiona’s undercover, we understand Fiona herself at two levels: the Fiona she’s pretending to be, and the Fiona she really is.

Last week, I said that our two masters of fiction worked via (i) putting some real unpredictability into their characters and (ii) letting us, the reader, figure out what’s going on.

The scene we’ve looked at today involves two people not one, so the focus is always shared.

But the same basic rule applies.

Keep the scene unpredictable. Here, the scene gets its tension in part because we know that Fiona isn’t actually a horrible cow. She’s someone who normally would share her blankets or comfort a woman in distress. So we keep sort of expecting her to do just that. But she doesn’t. She keeps the blankets and tells woman-in-distress to fuck off.

Fiona’s a joy to write in part because she brings her own built-in unpredictability. You have to pay close attention to the scene, because (this is Fiona) you just aren’t sure what’ happening next.

And: don’t explain.

There’s basically no explanation for the reader at all in the parts I’ve just quoted. A little further on, though, we get this:

I say, ‘Anna, how did you get into all this? Why did you get started?’

And she tells me.

Almost without further prompting. Without thought for where she is or who could be listening. It’s a beautiful illustration of the interrogator’s oldest maxim: that people want to confess. An urge as deep as breathing. The beautiful relief of sharing secrets.

That last paragraph is the first time that Fiona explains anything to the reader. But (and I think this is a pretty good rule in fiction) that the explanation is only given, once the reader already (kind of) knows it. (If you’re explaining how custody suites work or rules around covert recording, that’s different. I’m talking here about character/emotional type explanations.)

In effect, what Fiona is doing here is simply voicing something that the reader has already figured out.

So the reader brain is doing something like this: “Wow, Fiona is being a real cow. And blimey, Quintrell looks defeated. Oh, she’s crying now. And what’s this? Fiona’s being a little bit nice this morning. Bet Quintrell needs that. And – aha! – Fiona’s now basically inviting Quintrell to confess to everything. She really shouldn’t do that, but I can see she’s absolutely going to.”

All that Fiona is doing with her ‘urge to confess’ paragraph is wrapping that already-existing understanding up into a nice little package, so the reader-brain can dock that bit of knowledge and move on.

Always with these emails, I learn what I think by writing the email.

So, honestly, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to find today, but I think this last lesson is the big one. It’s OK to explain something character-related to the reader … but you need to only do that once the reader already basically knows. You’re drawing a line under something so you can move on, but the reader needs to have done the work for themselves first.

Here endeth the lesson.

And if you find yourself in a cell with Fiona, then keep your mouth shut – and your blankets close.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Explanations

Interesting one today. I want you to find a place in your text where you explain something about character X. Does the reader already kind of know what you’re saying, or not? Why is the explanation here. Find a 300 word chunk and tell us your thoughts.

When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry

Crime readers are a discerning bunch and if you asked a hundred what draws them to the genre, I’d put money on the words “pace” and “tension” topping most lists. You can have a beautifully constructed plot with an exquisitely satisfying ending – but unless you keep the reader promising themselves just one more chapter, your efforts will be wasted. 

Pacy, gripping crime fiction is hard to sustain over 80k plus words. It’s both exhausting and cruel to the reader to try to achieve it by writing fight after car chase after clifftop shootout. Plot and action can’t do all the lifting, so here are three lower-octane aspects of writing that will keep the screws turning… 

Character 

In the words of acclaimed US author Dennis Lehane, ‘You create a bunch of characters and let them bounce into one another. That’s how a good story happens.’  

But how? First, set your protagonist and antagonists up so the reader will care about (not necessarily like) them.  

• What kind of person are they?  

• What do they want most in life?  

• What would they kill / die for?  

• What are their secrets?  

• How do they justify their behaviour to themselves and others? 

• Why are they and their opponents such adversaries?  

• Why does the fight / journey / case mean so much to them?  

• What are their redeeming / damning features? 

Now, use every opportunity to set up conflict between them. That doesn’t mean them brawling every time they meet – but keep ratcheting up the stakes. Make your antagonist dump impossible jeopardy on your protagonist time and again, culminating in the mother of all showdowns. 

Your cast will not only carry the story, they are the story. It’s not the events themselves that matter, but the impact each has on your main characters: both in the moment, and as their arcs, and that of your story, progress. 

Setting 

You don’t even need people to up the ante. One of the most beautiful crime novels I’ve read this year is All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker.  

In this scene, Saint, a young girl, ventures into the wilderness in a last-ditched effort to rescue her kidnapped friend, Patch. Without once mentioning how she feels, Whitaker lets the setting do all the work:  

She checked her map a dozen times before she found a hard yellow sign. CAUTION MINIMUM MAINTENANCE ROAD LEVEL B SERVICE ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.…A tractor sprayed with mud, its scoop left buried in the dirt. The track fed the mouth of woodland so dense she slowed as possum haw leaves slid to a gulley… Saint splashed through a stream crossing, her sneakers soon filled with the brace of cold. … above ravens watched her like prey. At the first fall of rain she looked through a canopy that stammered light as wind parted it.  

For me this is the gold standard of conjuring terror through setting. Vivid descriptions peppered with metaphors of abandonment – ‘the scoop left buried in the dirt’ – and fear – ‘her sneaker filled with the brace of cold’. These are images to die for, in my humble crime writing opinion. 

Take how Stevenson, in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, through the rise then fall of the fog, evokes incredible eeriness as Mr Utterson travels to find Hyde, wanted for murder: 

The fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling. 

Dialogue 

We all know to ‘show, not tell’ where appropriate, and dialogue is one of the strongest ways of vividly moving a plot on. Without info dumping, by using character traits and speech patterns you can build tension, create conflict and even craft legendary scenes (remember the ‘You can’t handle the truth’ courtroom exchange in A Few Good Men?)  

Some great tips for dramatic dialogue are to: 

• Create and sustain subtext through unspoken thoughts and memorable lines 

• Build conflict, remembering less is more so avoid melodrama 

• Avoid niceties and fillers; make every line count 

• Reveal something new, however small, in each passage 

• Use action to underline meaning and drama 

• End on a dramatic high. 

The key to great dialogue is authenticity and differentiation. If you can hear your characters’ distinct voices, as if they’re people actually speaking and sparking off one another, you have the makings of a thrilling scene with escalating tension that races the story along. 

Throughout the Jericho Writers’ Crime and Thriller Course, we study all these techniques. It’s fascinating how the students adapt to applying the principles and examples we focus on, and how dramatic their stories become as a result.  

Try them for yourself and see how they work for you. 

The internet is practically bursting with content on the writing routines of best-selling authors. But these writers already make a living from the craft. Their schedules often feel completely different from those of aspiring debut authors, who might be juggling a day job and caring for dependents while trying to find any spare moment to write. So, is a writing routine necessary – and if so, how can it be tailored to suit you? 

A novel (or non-fiction book) for adults is roughly 80,000 words long. To complete a draft in a year, you'd need to achieve an output of 6,650 words a month (or 1,500 words a week). Viewed like this, the task doesn’t seem insurmountable. And there’s nobody saying you have to finish that first draft in twelve months, either. This is where establishing a writing routine comes in. 

Below, I’ve looked at the writing routines of some of my aspiring debut clients, alongside those of well-known authors: 

Fawzia (aspiring debut): “I have three hours a week to write. That’s it. I’m a mum to two young children and I tell myself I’ll write in the evenings, but I’m too fried. My three-hour stint (when the kids are in childcare) is gold dust. Although it doesn’t amount to a huge word-count, it’s all I’ve got. Without that time, I’d go mad!” 

The famous author: Haruki Murakami rises early, and runs and swims at intervals to break up his desk time. In his words, “Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”  

Claudia (aspiring debut): “My kids are at school full-time. I teach part time, so I manage to dedicate one day a week to writing. I start as soon as the house is empty and leave everything, including housework and lesson planning, until after the kids are home. I’m not a slave to wordcount because I can’t be. I just have to ringfence this time, and use it as best I can.” 

The famous author: Jodi Picoult starts her narratives already knowing the conclusion, then works backwards to find out how to get there. Jodi’s approach to writing is that it’s a ‘proper’ job and requires an 8-hour day.   

Andreas (aspiring debut): “I live alone. I’m lucky to be able to write during the day, and schedule my paid work in the evenings. I’ve so far turned out an impressive word-count on a weekly basis, but often it’s sketchy and gets deleted and rewritten. But so long as I’m writing, I’m trying my best, even if it’s a long-term work-in-progress.” 

The famous author: Kate Mosse explains, “For me, the writing comes at the very end of the preparation and planning, which might take four or five years. When I write, I start very early in the day – maybe 4 o’clock – with a cup of strong, sweet black coffee and my tiny laptop… I then write for, say, seven/eight hours a day, before disappearing off for a walk or a swim or anything that keeps the old bones moving. After that, a quiet evening with the family… ready to begin again the next morning.” 

Padraig (aspiring debut): “Now the kids have grown and flown, I reserve Saturdays for writing. I guard my Saturdays jealously (it’s become a bit of a family joke). I don’t care how slowly I write, so long as I can keep working on my book that sacred one day a week.” 

The famous author: David Mitchell notes, “I could probably write for ten hours a day if I had them, but I’ve got two young children, so I can either be a halfway decent dad or I can be a writer who writes all day. I can’t really be both. As things stand, I might clock in three hours on a poor day, and six or seven on a productive day. Sometimes… I forget the time until my long-suffering wife begins to drop noisy hints.”  

The final words must go to Kate Mosse, because her writing routine advice fits any lifestyle or circumstance: “Five minutes a day are better than no minutes. You might not yet have time to write that ‘big’ novel you’ve been planning, but everyone – whatever their responsibilities for working, caring, life – can find five minutes a day. Keep a pad and paper by the kettle… or send text messages to yourself. Look at people in the street and think of how you’d put them on the page with just three words… when you do have time to write, you’ll be match fit and ready to go.” 

Four Tips for Establishing Your Writing Routine: 

• Decide when (and how long) you can write for each week 

• Set a ‘time-aside’ goal, or a wordcount goal – and be realistic!  

• Be kind to yourself – sometimes life gets in the way 

• Give yourself time off, too.  

You know how gifted artists can suggest a face – and a mood, a character, a personality – in just a few swift lines?

Well, writers can do the same. So today’s email is just a “stand and admire” type affair. Two writers. Two vastly different techniques. But some surprising commonalities in the way they work…

Dialogue with Big El

How about this from Elmore Leonard:

'Man, all the photographers, TV cameras. This shit is big news, has everybody over here to see it. Otherwise, Sunday, what you have mostly are rich ladies come out with their little doggies to make wee-wee. I mean the doggies, not the ladies.' A girl in front of them smiled over her shoulder and Ordell said, 'How you doing, baby? You making it all right?' He looked past her now, glanced at Louis to say, 'I think I see him,' and pushed through the crowd to get closer to the street. 'Yeah, there he is. Black shirt and tie? A grown-up skinhead Nazi. I call him Big Guy. He likes that.'

'It's Richard,' Louis said. 'Jesus.'

The speaker is a guy called Ordell. This is the second page of Rum Punch, so the reader has no prior knowledge of the character. But that little paragraph? It says so much. It says:

1. He talks a kind of cool, urban tough guy English – which is just about right. He’s a ruthless blackmarket operator in LA.
2. At the same time, “with their little doggies to make wee-wee”? Huh? What? This is such an unexpected turn of phrase, we don’t quite know what to do with it. I think, for me, this is sign of a kind of unpredictability. If the guy was angry with you and happened to have a gun in his hand, you’d have no idea which way he was about to leap.
3. And sure enough, it’s straight from that highly unexpected phrase to a very standard pick-up type line (“How you doing, baby?”). From a white power march to doggies making wee to a very basic pick-up line. Our heads are spinning.
4. And then, we get to the point of the scene: “There he is. Black shirt and tie. A grown-up skinhead Nazi.” And oh, OK, we readjust again. Forget the pretty girls. Forget the doggie wee-wees. We’re hunting Nazis. And Nazis are bad, right? No one loves a Nazi. Plus, we assume correctly that Ordell is Black, and so he surely really really doesn’t like Nazis.
5. Only then, yet another switcheroo: “I call him Big Guy. He likes that.” And again: huh? Why are we making nice with skinhead Nazis? Why is Ordell, of all people doing so?

The whole paragraph is barely 100 words, but it’s told us so much already about Ordell – and already locked us into the story, because we know that anything involving Ordell and Nazi Big Guy is going to involve violence and a lot of unpredictability and fireworks.

Big El’s tips for humans:

1. Throw unpredictability into your dialogue. Steer one way, then abruptly somewhere different.
2. Let the dialogue do character description for you. Leonard doesn’t need to tell us that Ordell is highly sexed and ready to try it on with pretty much anyone. He just writes 9 words of dialogue and leaves us to figure it out.

Interior Monologue, with Mrs Robinson

Here is a completely opposite technique from Marilynne Robinson – a technique so opposite, that Elmore Leonard would never use it:

I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little.

No dialogue here. It’s all interior reflection. And John Ames, the narrator here, is about as far from Ordell as you could possibly imagine.

But we have the same themes at play here:

1. Real unpredictability. Here, the narrator surprises us by telling us that people are asking him (a person who’s alive) what it’s like to be dead. Then he surprises us further, by telling us that elderly people would ask him that even when he was young. Then he comes up with what is maybe a somewhat expected line about going home… but then thwarts that by saying we have no home in the world… before going on to talk about what might actually be the homiest thing in the world, namely a fried egg sandwich and coffee and radio.
2. Let the interior monologue do the character work for you. In just the same way as regular dialogue for Elmore Leonard, Marilynne Robinson doesn’t bother to tell us much about her character. She just lets him narrate and forces the reader to draw inferences.

I was originally going to pick a third novelist to compare as well, but I’m intrigued enough by the basis similarity in approach here – unpredictability plus a lot of reliance on the reader figuring things out for themselves – that I wanted to see how I approach the same  issues.

And – well, it’s complicated. I write first person as Fiona and, yes, Fiona is notably unnpredictable right from her actions through to her word choices. She doesn’t explain herself much. She just is, and lets the reader draw their own conclusions. So in terms of my approach with Fiona, I guess I operate on largely the same lines as the two models here.

But when it comes to Fiona encountering other characters, something a bit more complicated is going on. We’ll look at that next week.

In the meantime, it’s time for…

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Give me any chunk (100-200 words max; we want short) that shows deep characterisation in a few swift lines. Look for unpredictability and a reliance on the reader’s own intelligence. It’s going to be interesting to see what you come up with.

When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry

We all know about Chekhov’s gun. The playwright wrote to a young dramatist saying: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.”

And quite right too. Bang, bang, do svidanya, tovarishch, and all that.

But? Oh hang it:

• He was Russian, and Russians drink black tea with jam, and how far can you trust anyone who does that?
• He was a dramatist and we write novels, and those two things are obviously related but they’re also obviously not the same.
• He was clearly rather prone to giving that advice, since he’s recorded as giving it at least three times, and at a certain point, you do wonder if he wasn’t simply enjoying the aphorism as much as truly believing it.

The biggest difference between the novel and the play is simply that of length.

Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard runs to about 18,000 words. Macbeth runs to 17,000. King Lear, 26,000.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my character’s barely pulled on her jeans and pistol-whipped her first victim by that point in a book. She’s barely done brushing her teeth. If your chosen art form is (by our lofty standards) rather short, then damn right you can’t fool around with guns that don’t fire.

Novels, I think, can be messier. They are built to resemble life, and life is messy, so I don’t really see why novels can’t be messy.

Now there are strict limits here, of course. Your plot needs to be plotty. Your resolution needs to feel like it’s summarising and concluding some important thing that has occupied the reader for the past 350 pages.

The ragged edge

But a ragged edge? Some questions answered only with a shrug? For me, that’s fine. Here’s an example from one of my books. The question is how Parry (a kidnapper) ended teaming up with a bunch of monks. Here’s all I say about it:

Parry’s living in this valley. Maybe starts going to one or two services in the monastery just for the hell of it. Or because he had a guilty conscience. Or to build himself some cover. Who knows? Anyway, he gets serious. He finds God—or his own crazy and violent version of God—and he decides to make some changes in the way he operates …

And Parry’s new buddies, these monks, are more than a bit crazy themselves. They have this big silence and reflection and abstinence thing going. They have a deep sense that people who grew up with God in their lives have become deaf to His word …

Now, quite honestly that’s more of a hand-wave than an actual answer. Structurally speaking, what I say here is “Maybe … or … or … who knows? Anyway …”

For me, that’s fine. Even in a crime novel whose purpose is to solve mystery, that kind of thing is fine.

Here’s another example, at the end of another novel:

‘All a bit messy and last minute, but anything to get the job done.’

‘Yes, exactly. If we work hard enough, I expect we’ll find a link between Devine and Wormold. At any rate, I’m pretty sure that Devine gave the order.’

Jackson thinks about that. Gathers more daisies. We’re motoring now. Him gathering, me stitching them.

What we have here is a slightly disengaged conversation about how Bad Guy A ended up conspiring with Bad Guy B, but in the end, the business of making a supermassive daisy-chain seems more important and that thread is never picked up again.

I think so long as the text somehow acknowledges that yes, some questions remain unanswered, it doesn’t really matter that they exist. And, me – I prefer it. It feels more authentic, makes the world more real.

The long game

And at that same time, I also love the ridiculously delayed punchline – a way of tying things up neatly, but 10s of 1000s of words later than the reader might expect.

So in one of my books (chapter 29) this bit of dialogue takes place:

‘Twll dîn pob Sais,’ I say.

‘Pardon?’

‘Doesn’t matter. The address of the cottage, please.’

That phrase in Welsh isn’t explained. The matter is just left. In Chekhovian terms, that gun may be unimportant, but it feels very not-fired.

Except that, a full twenty chapters, later, we get this:

[In deepest Glasgow,] Two kids pass my car. One of them raps on my window. I wind my window down and say, ‘Yes?’ The kid says something in an accent so thick I don’t understand it. I reply in Welsh, the same thing as I said to Sophie Hinton.Twll dîn pob Sais. Every Englishman an arsehole. He goes off muttering. He might as well be speaking Icelandic.

That’s the punchline. We didn’t understand what Fiona said to pretty Sophie Hinton at the time, but now we do, and the delay is entertaining. It’s like the author was remembering that twenty chapters back, the reader felt a little moment of discomfort – tiny, but nevertheless a little negative prick – and, ta-daa, the author, smiling says, I hadn’t forgotten you. Surprise! Here’s your little gift. In the process, we understand something more about the Fiona / Hinton relationship. The whole thing feels more delightful because of the absurdly long pause.

Or here’s another example. Fiona is talking to the abbot of a small monastery in Wales:

‘You’ll recognise our patron, of course?’

It takes me a second, but I realise he’s talking about St David, a Welsh bishop of the sixth century and the patron saint of Wales.

‘David,’ I say. ‘A local boy.’

‘Local enough. He was preaching at the Synod of Brefi to a large crowd. Because those at the back couldn’t hear him, a small hill rose up beneath him. The dove here settled on his shoulder.’

‘That’s his big miracle?’ I ask. ‘Making a hill? In Wales?’

It’s hard to think of a more superfluous achievement.

That moment is complete in itself. No little prick of disappointment for the reader. But then, ten chapters on, we get this:

I chide him. ‘You’re thinking modern again, Inspector. You need to think medieval.’ That doesn’t illuminate things for some reason. So I explain, ‘This is the monastery of St David. He’s their patron saint. Now David’s big thing, his signature miracle if you want to put it like that, was raising a hill at Llandewi Brefi—’

‘A hill? In Llandewi? Why would anyone—?’

‘I know, don’t ask. But …’

And what this does is to bring the reader onto the inside of the joke. It’s like we and the reader are old buddies, with a shared set of jokes and references. When Inspector Burnett stumbles into the set-up, the reader has the delight of recognising it – “Oooh, I know this one!” We don’t even have to complete the joke properly to get that pleasure, and Fiona moves rapidly on.

One last example. In the Deepest Grave, Fiona proposes to fake an antiquity. Here she is talking with her two co-conspirators:

George stares at Katie. Stares at me. And back again.

‘Do you mean what I think you mean?’

Katie nods. ‘Exactly. Yes. She wants to make—’

I interrupt. Say, ‘Caledfwlch.’

Katie: ‘What?’

‘Caledfwlch. The damn thing is Welsh, not some fake Latin, medieval French knock-off.’

Now there’ll be some Welsh-speakers who know their ancient history and for whom that little passage is as plain as day. But the vast majority of readers, will be thinking huh? On the one hand, Fiona has just told us exactly what she intends to make. On the other, virtually no one has any idea what she means.

It’s that Chekhovian gun again, very not fired.

Only then … and again, many chapters later we get an incident at an archaeological dig in the south of England. The researchers have just extracted a remarkably ancient sword from a burial pit, when armed robbers swoop in, and steal it. Here’s what happens afterwards:

[The robbers] drive off. The whole thing takes two minutes, maybe less.

For a moment, just a moment, there is perfect stillness.

A bird, a lapwing maybe, calling aloft. The burr of the motorway.

Then Tifford, Dr Simon Tifford, Senior Archaeologist and a man now very close to tears, breaks the silence.

‘They’ve stolen Excalibur,’ he wails. ‘They’ve stolen fucking Excalibur.’

And, aha!, now we know what Caledfwlch is. We solve that little moment of mystery some 75 pages earlier, but there’s laughter here too. The reader’s saying, “Ah! You even told me what the thing was, and I didn’t guess, and I probably should have done, and now you’ve got an archaeologist wandering around swearily talking about the world’s most famous-ever sword. Yep, you got me there.”

It's the length of the delay that delivers the pleasure – all the joy rests in that huge delay.

The ragged edge, the long game

So yes, I do love a ragged edge to a story. A sense of nothing ever too tidy, questions still nibbling like minnows. But I do love jokes and puzzles where the punchline takes an age to come – that gun finally fired, but long, long after it was expected.

That’s it from me. Last night, I ate stewed apricot, served very cold, with big soft pillows of whipped cream. Toasted hazelnuts on top. Oh my. Summer is lovely.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The long game

Do you have any much-delayed punchlines or reveals in your book? Things held out of sight for a long period, then released to delight? Tell me about it. I want some quotes. Let’s feast on some actual text again – it’s been too long.

Log into Townhouse and share it in this forum.

Til soon.

Harry

Whether you're halfway through a novel or haven’t written in a while, short stories can be such a refreshing way to get back into the flow. They’re quick, creative, and honestly brilliant for warming up your writing muscles—especially if you’re in need of a nudge.

Maybe you’re thinking of entering a competition, or just want to shake things up with something totally different from what you’re working on. Either way, short stories are a brilliant space to experiment— with voice, structure, characters, all of it—without the pressure of a huge project. And the best part? Writing more short stories really does make you a better writer.

If you’re looking for a spark of inspiration, we’ve put together some writing prompts to help you get started. Who knows—one of these might just turn into your next favourite piece.

Short story writing prompts

Let’s start broad. These creative writing prompts can be adapted to any genre, and they’re perfect for sparking those first few sentences when you’re staring at a blank page.

• A character finds a letter in an old book—addressed to them, but written 100 years ago.
• Someone makes the exact same wish every year on their birthday. This year, it comes true—but not in the way they imagined.
• A shop that only appears at night opens its doors to one unsuspecting visitor.
• A character decides to disappear for a day without telling their family. What happens when they return?

These short story prompts are especially handy for short story writers entering competitions—judges often look for originality, a strong hook, and a satisfying ending, all of which can grow from a well-formed idea.

Romance short story prompts

For those who love a dash of longing and connection, these romance-themed ideas are ideal:

• Two rival street performers keep trying to outdo each other at the same spot. Their acts get more elaborate... and more flirtatious.
• A character agrees to be someone's fake date for a wedding—only to realise too late it's their ex’s wedding.
• Someone receives a text from an unknown number. They start replying. It becomes the highlight of their day.
• A florist keeps receiving anonymous deliveries of rare flowers. Each one comes with a clue.

Romantic short stories are a great way to test chemistry and tension between characters in just a few pages—and who doesn’t love a heartwarming twist?

Funny short story prompts

Want to make your reader laugh (or at least raise an eyebrow)? Here are some humorous creative writing prompts to play with:

• A ridiculous item gets posted to the wrong address.
• A character joins a cult by mistake after trying to sign up for a free yoga class.
• A character joins a protest thinking it’s about climate change—turns out it’s to save a beloved local sandwich.
• A character tries a new mindfulness app, only to find it starts commenting on their life choices. Loudly. In public.

Funny short stories are a brilliant way to experiment with voice and timing, and they’re often memorable in competition entries for all the right reasons.

Fantasy short story prompts

Need something a little more magical? These short story ideas are great for fans of speculative fiction:

• A character sells spells for other people, but why won’t their own spells work for them?
• A secret guild of mapmakers redraws the world every night, but one accidentally erases their hometown. Now they have to fix it before midnight.
• A witch gives a character the ability to read minds for one day only.
• A character decides to bottle and sell dreams. One buyer wants a refund.

Fantasy is where short stories get to play big. You don’t need a thousand pages to whisk a reader off to a world with dragon-crawling forests, talking crows, or secret societies in the sea. In just a few scenes, you can explore magic, power, good vs evil—or just what happens when someone opens the wrong door. Its imagination turned up at the highest volume, and the best part? You make the rules. Then you break them.

Scary short story prompts

Ready to chill your readers’ bones? Try these scary short story prompts for a darker twist:

• A character moves into a new house and finds the exact same furniture they left in their old one—right down to the scratches.
• Every time someone looks in the mirror, the reflection smiles just a second too late.
• A voice on the baby monitor starts giving warnings.
• A child draws the same faceless figure every day, saying it visits them at night.

Short horror stories are brilliant for bumping up tension and mood—and they make deliciously scary entries for seasonal contests (hello, Halloween looking at you) or eerie little anthologies.

Psychological thriller prompts

What happens when your character can’t trust what they see—or themselves? Try these psychological thriller prompts and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes:

• A man wakes up every day to a voice recording he doesn’t remember making. Each day, the message gets more disturbing.
• Someone starts to suspect they’re being followed. But when they finally confront the stalker, the person insists they’re the one being followed.
• A therapist realises all of their clients are dreaming about the same person—but none of them know each other.
• A woman’s new housemate is perfect. Too perfect. And she’s starting to mirror the woman’s habits… exactly.

Short stories are a perfect match for psychological thrillers—tense, twisty, and packed with just enough uncertainty to leave readers checking over their shoulders. These stories thrive on doubt, shifting perspectives, and the slow unravelling of what we think we know. Whether it’s obsession, memory, or a truth hiding in plain sight, it’s all about playing with the mind.

Historical fiction prompts

What might your characters uncover—or risk—when the past refuses to stay buried? Try these historical fiction prompts to dig into secrets, scandals, and moments that still echo through time:

• During WWII, a woman running a bookshop starts slipping coded messages between the pages for the resistance.
• A photographer in the 1920s captures something shocking on film—and must decide whether to share it.
• In 1950s Soho, a jazz singer becomes the target of surveillance after befriending someone with political ties.
• A lighthouse keeper in the 1800s battles loneliness and the strange lights that appear offshore every foggy night.

Short stories are a brilliant way to zoom in on a single moment, a hidden voice, or a tiny rebellion that never made it into the textbooks. All you need is a sliver of time, a strong sense of place, and someone with something to lose.

Take a break, try a prompt

Whether you're deep into your novel or juggling a few too many writing plates, stepping away to write a short story can feel like a creative exhale. Prompts are brilliant for breaking through blocks, playing with new characters, or sparking an idea that surprises you and takes on a life of its own!

And who knows—your next short story might just turn into something bigger than you expected.

Want more inspiration?

Check out these other blogs on short story writing...

Short Story Structure: The Art of Writing a Great Short Story

How To Write A Short Story In 10 Steps

10 Great Examples of How to Begin a Short Story

That’s right: eight months. Less than a year.  

If you’re like I once was – that is, if you’ve spent years thinking about writing a novel but rarely putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard – this timeframe might sound mad. But, as I discovered when I finally gave writing a proper go, showing up to your manuscript consistently can yield far quicker results than you might think.  

Now, having published four books, I’d say a good quality draft (90,000 words or so) takes me around six months to pull together. So, what took me from dreaming about writing to actually doing it? I didn’t undergo an overnight personality transplant or discover a magical wellspring of motivation. (Unfortunate, as that would still be super useful). In fact, I did that most cliched yet crucial of things. I gave myself permission to try.  

As if to signal to myself that having a bash at writing a book was 100% allowed, I signed up for a creative writing course. Ultimately, this made all the difference to my craft, discipline and self-belief – but in the short-term, following a structured programme felt far more comfortable than simply winging it in the hope I’d one day reach ‘the end’.  

If you think you’d benefit from a similar experience, our eight-month Novel Writing Course might be exactly what you need. It’s designed for writers who have great ideas but feel they’re flying blind when it comes to plot-planning, character development, worldbuilding and so on. 

Not ready to commit to a course? With a little planning, plus positivity and persistence, you can still get your book written (or at least well underway) in less than a year.  

Feeling fired up? Here’s what to do next… 

Eight steps to writing your novel in eight months

1. Plan your story upfront

George RR Martin could have written about the bitter divide between House Planner and House Pantser. For the uninitiated, the debate comes down to the difference between people who simply must have an outline before they begin drafting and those with the brass neck to sit down at a blank screen and just… see what happens.  

I joke, of course: there’s no real argument. We writers are a peaceful people, and most accept there’s no right or wrong way to work. Personally, though, I need a proper plan before I get going – and if your ambition is to write a book within eight months, I don’t think risking ‘dead time’ (where you produce thousands of words that may serve no clear purpose) makes much sense.  

If you’re a Premium Member, you can access our Build Your Book Month content for free. This includes a very helpful plot-planning spreadsheet and a bunch of fantastic video lessons on the three-act story structure. (Not a PM? You can buy the content as a standalone course for £99, or join us to get this, plus plenty more writing resources).  

Alternatively, you might want to consider the Save The Cat approach, the five-act story structure or the snowflake method, all of which will allow you to create an overall ‘shape’ for your story before you start writing. However you choose to plan, doing so will effectively stress-test your novel idea, helping you work out whether it will extend into a narrative that’s tens of thousands of words long.  

On the Novel Writing Course, students spend their first month focused on planning their novels, and I’d suggest devoting a similar chunk of time – weeks, rather than days – to interrogating your story arc independently. Imagine the events, twists and turns you’ll include in your plot and work out how they’ll affect the journey your characters go on. Rushing through this stage tends to be a false economy: fail to answer key questions now, and they’ll come back to bite you later.  

2. Consider your novel's characters, point of view and setting

Who are you writing about? What problems do they have, and how does your protagonist – or their situation – need to change in order for your story to be satisfying? Remember, a novel isn’t really about what happens: it’s about how what happens affects characters readers care about.  

Are you going to write in first person, third person, past or present tense? (You might have to experiment a bit with points of view in order to find out what’s most effective.)  

Where will the action of your story take place? Is there research you need to do, or worldbuilding you need to undertake, before you can start drafting in earnest?  

These questions need consideration both before you begin writing, but also as your story unfolds. Again, the Novel Writing Course offers tutorials and one-to-one support with all this. Meanwhile, if you’re a Premium Member, you’ll find there are multiple masterclasses available to help you.

3. Develop a novel writing routine

If you want to draft a novel in eight months, you’ll need to commit to writing regularly. Establishing a routine you can stick to (at least most of the time) is key, so ask yourself: when do you work best? How many hours per day, or per week, do you think you can spend on your manuscript?  

You might want to think in terms of word count milestones, rather than time spent at your desk – though this can be demotivating on days when the sentences won’t flow! That said, you’ll definitely need to set an overall wordcount goal that makes sense for the genre you’re writing in. If your book is commercial fiction, for example, you shouldn’t be aiming to write a 1000-page tome.  

You might want to put together a novel writing timeline that takes your final goal, plus any holidays or days off writing you’re going to need, into account. This will ensure you stay on track, but also that you keep your workload realistic. 

Whichever way you do it, create a plan that will make showing up to your work-in-progress something that feels natural: automatic. Being enrolled on a course did this job for me. I didn’t want to be the classmate who hadn’t done her homework, so I made sure to show up with fresh words every time I was supposed to! 

Finally, why not incentivise yourself a little? If you’re planning to write first thing in the morning, pair your early start with an extra-swish coffee. Alternatively, if your book work needs to wait until after the kids are in bed, make settling down with it feel like a treat: grab a cuppa, light a candle and settle in.  

4. Don't be afraid to deviate...

Having a plot plan shouldn’t stifle your creativity. See it as a roadmap for your adventure in story-telling – not a tunnel that offers only one way through.  

It’s not unusual for events to play out slightly differently on the page than they did in your head, or for a minor character’s voice to end up louder than you’d anticipated. Exploring opportunities when they arise – indulging these moments of inspiration – is where much of the true joy of writing is found.  

So, allow for deviations on the road to finishing your story – so long as they don’t take you to a completely random destination! 

5. Push perfectionism aside

If you’re writing to a deadline, you can’t afford to edit every single sentence as you go.  

Resist the urge to perfect each paragraph you produce in favour of pushing forward with your plot. If you must, highlight chunks of text you’re not convinced about so you don’t forget to examine them later – but focus on finishing your book before you worry about making every word beautiful.  

6. Write with authenticity

‘Sticky patches’ in writing often occur because getting the words out feels like pulling teeth. In those moments, I ask myself: am I trying to write something that doesn’t feel true, or in a style that’s not natural to me? 

Finding your own voice is a process, and it’s something we cover in detail on the Novel Writing Course.  

If you’re feeling blocked, try stepping back. Approach the plot point or scene you’re working on afresh. Write it honestly, with no spin – in the way you might if your only aim was entertaining a good friend. See what happens.  

7. Think about sharing your story

Different people choose to use buddies or beta readers at different stages of their writing journey – but constructive criticism can be helpful during, as well as after, drafting.  

As I worked on my first book, I found my friends’ and mentor’s feedback helped me avoid making mistakes that might have tripped me up – but their encouragement also kept me going when writing felt too hard and I lost confidence in myself.  

One of the best things about the Novel Writing Course is the incredible level of one-to-one support every student gets from their personal tutor: more individual guidance than is offered on any alternative out there.  

8. Power through your novel - then pause

The difference between people who write whole novels and those who don’t is almost always that the first group simply refused to give up. There are plenty of talented writers out there who’ll never complete a full manuscript – not because they lack the ability, but because they aren’t tenacious enough.  

With a plan and a writing routine in place, your job is actually pretty simple: keep showing up.  

If you do, in eight months (or within a realistic timeframe that works for you), you’ll have a full draft – a truly incredible achievement.  

When you get there, have a rest. Give yourself a little distance from your draft before diving back in to edit it.  

If they feel ready, students on our Novel Writing Course have the option to upgrade to the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme after spending eight months on their drafts. This involves extra tutoring on self-editing, the different routes into publishing and how to get a literary agent. For Premium Members, there’s Debi Alper’s fantastic Introduction to Self-Editing Your Novel course: the perfect, self-guided route into refining your own work.  

Whatever kind of support you seek with your writing – whether it’s through a course, Premium Membership or engagement with our Townhouse community – I wish you all the best with getting your novel written.  

You really can do it – and in eight months, too!

Hello again! Welcome back to my series of blogs on what it’s really like to be a student on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

Month three focuses in on the topic of Setting. So, place and time, essentially. We’re talking descriptions of the immediate environment, descriptions of fashion, technology and social norms relevant to the point(s) in time when the story unfolds. It means descriptions of weather too, of the creatures, plants and other people who inhabit the same environment. But the most enjoyable aspect of Setting is the symbolism it enables. This feels really important. Delivering layers of symbolism feels like constructing a secret language between the reader and I. Huge fun. 

My stories are limited only by the stretch of my imagination. My characters can be put anywhere in space and time within the known universe, and if I was writing fantasy or science-fiction, even beyond these. So, it stands to reason that, out of the infinite possibilities, the setting I plump for must have significance. I chose it – I must have reasons. Why select it, otherwise? That’s true of the macro decisions on setting, and the micro. Why 2001 as the time-setting for the story? Why July? Why 6 o'clock in the evening? Why that rainbow in the sky? Why that country and county? Why that town? Why that café? Why that seat?  

This is how I get to perform magic. Via linguistic sleight of hand, the setting can make things apparent in flashy or subtle moments as the story requires. I can lay down a new and unexpected symbolism, with a ‘Did you see that?’ ambition for how the reader will experience it. Obviously (because I am writing books, not performing card-tricks in front of a live-audience) I have to hope the symbolism works in the way I intend – like seeds intended to flower in the imagination. For me, the fun is the idea that one day someone will smile whilst making a connection to their humanity, and murmur: ‘Yes, that’s right. I get that.’ 

In the story that I’m writing while studying on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, the main setting is a Suffolk village commune in a grand manor house. The house has been both a Nunnery and Friar Monks Seminary before it was purchased by the commune. It’s inspired by a real-life commune I often go past on long dog walks. The buildings alone are fascinating. But the real reason it is the main setting for my two main characters is that I can play with its meaning - how that relates to and foreshadows the emotional arcs my characters will experience. How they both hide from certain aspects of themselves, shutting themselves off from emotions, but also their definition of what family is, relative to community, relative to society. 

My previous manuscript (currently out querying literary agents – nine rejections so far, thanks for asking) features a woman held unknowingly between life and death. So, I placed her on a Suffolk beach next to the sea-ruined wreck of her ancestral farmhouse, also inspired by real-life events. What metaphor could be better than to sit between land and sea, between life and death, between the choice to carry on or give up? A liminal setting for a liminal story. I had a lot of fun stitching in descriptions of the beach, choosing specific colloquial plant names – Dead Man’s Bells is a real plant name, for instance. I used the rhythm of waves and how they move the land, and worked in the unknowable depths and power of sea and storm. Uncontrollable forces extinguished a whole village practically overnight, so I linked that to the choices my character made – and the emotional storms which had the capacity to ruin her life.  

Is it clear how much I love wielding the craft skill of setting in my writing? I hope so. When I began writing seriously again, it was setting I began with – big, wide-angled shots of the environment my characters moved through. Long passages with all the words! Yes! As tutor Anna Vaught says, I wanted *all* the words! Creating setting is how I came back to writing. I have a theory many new writers begin in this way, describing the world of their story before considering depth of character or even plot. 

I’ve learnt to be more judicious in my deployment of setting. The Ultimate Novel Writing Programme is helping me understand how it grounds the reader, how swiftly the description of a highly-specific setting can connect the reader’s imagination to the story.  

I now know how being selective in what I highlight, using vivid nouns and active verbs, can more effectively deliver meaning, conjuring the how and what the character does and experiences more successfully in the reader’s mind. Setting was a foundational stone of my writing, and this month is definitely underpinning why I still love it so.  

Happy writing, until next time!  
 
Rachel 

Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

Mostly, as you know (you know, you know), 

These emails are long (too long! too long!), 

But then again (and again and again), 

At least they’re fresh (So fresh! So fresh!) 

But this one isn’t. It’s a reprint of something I wrote five years back. I came across it at random, and I liked it, and I thought you might too. It goes – with some teeny-weeny adjustments – like as follows. 

(Well, almost. I just wanted to call your attention to the ABSURDLY low price we’ve put on our Ultimate Novel Writing Programme mentoring taster sessions. In a nutshell, for £20 you get to have a twenty-minute mentoring session with one of the tutors from the Programme. If you’re halfway interested in doing the UNWP, then this is a brilliant option for you to explain where you are in your writing journey, what you want next - and to ask any questions you may have. But the offer isn’t restricted to UNWP-ers, so if the idea of chatting with a book expert is interesting to you, then jump on it. More info here.) 

OK. Here’s the email proper...

***

Into my inbox, crept this little beauty from Cameron: 

Hi Harry,

Inspired by your own recent releases, I thought it would be a fruitful exercise to compile a list of things I wish I had known before embarking on a writing journey. 

It has been quite liberating and given me great perspective on how far I've truly come as a writer. 

But I am curious: Of the many hard-fought lessons you've learned throughout your career, could you identify one as the single most important? Or, phrased another way, which one do you wish you would have learned first? 

The short answer, of course, is that I don’t know and can’t quite engage with the question.

Most writing wisdom is born of experience and interlocks with every other piece of wisdom. So a question of characterisation is also one of plotting which is also one of theme which is also to do with sense of place, and so forth. 

So mostly I come out with some stupid line that gets me away from the question and we move onto the next thing. 

Only – 

Actually – 

It did occur to me that there is one big piece of writing wisdom that I don’t talk about as much as I ought to. It’s simply this: 

You are many writers. You aren’t just one. 

I started out writing books in the same broad vein as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer. I hope there was a little more to my books than those comparisons suggest, but they were big, old-fashioned, non-violent romps, with plenty of family drama. They were fun to write. 

My first two books were contemporary dramas, but then, for no especial reason, I turned to a historical theme. The books were still in the same broad mould, but they had an extra richness because of the early twentieth century backgrounds. 

And then –  

Well, fashions changed and sales dwindled. My publisher would have been happy for more of the same, but not at the kind of advances I wanted. So I moved on again. 

I wrote popular non-fiction. 

I wrote niche non-fiction. 

I did some ghostwriting work. One of those projects was a really lovely one which hit the hardback and paperback bestseller lists. Another one sold in plenty of territories, made me a big fat bundle of money, and was just a joy to work on. 

And then, I changed again. I came back to fiction, to crime fiction this time, and found a character and niche I loved. 

I do still love that niche, but (as you may have noticed) I’ve also had time to update some old how-to books and republish those. And I’ve turned a bundle of these emails into a whole new book. Oh yes, and I have a mad-as-a-box-of-snakes literary project on the back-burner. And I get a glitter in my eye when I think of some new non-fiction work I’d love to write. 

I’ve also been traditionally published, self-published and am half-minded to flirt with digital-first publishing via a specialist firm.

Almost none of that was in the game plan when I started out, and I’m not unusual. 

Yes, you have a few careers like John Grisham’s. His first book did OK. His second book (published in 1991) spent almost a year on the NYT bestseller list and sold a bazillion copies. After that, he’s bashed out a book a year, pretty much. His name has become almost synonymous with legal thrillers. 

And even so – Grisham has written non-legal novels. He’s written kids’ books. He’s written non-fiction. He’s written short stories. 

All those things are side dishes to the main thrust of his work – the raita to the tikka marsala – but I bet when he was writing those other things, he was fully engaged by them too. Even when you’re a hugely productive author who dominates your particular genre, it turns out you are multiple writers too. More than you ever imagined at the outset. 

So my answer to Cameron is simply: 

Be multiple. 

Find other stories, other genres, other wings. 

You can’t know yet what will work for you and what won’t. Life, it turns out, is not that interested in game plans. 

And look, I don’t know your exact position. But I do sometimes see writers working for seven years, ten years, some huge stretch of time, in order to bring one piece of work to publication. 

And sometimes that’ll be the right thing to do. But mostly it won’t. Mostly you try one thing – learn lots – see if it works – and if it doesn’t, put it down. Try a new thing. Something else in the same broad genre or something totally unrelated. 

Your passions are like a pack of monkeys. They want to skip chattering across the jungle. 

So let them. Chase them with your notebook. Catch the fruit they fling down from the trees. Watch them in the rain and in their nests at night. 

You may not be the writer you think you have to be. That a frightening thought, but it’s also a liberating one. It liberated me, not once, but repeatedly. 

My guess? My guess is, that if your writing career has any longevity, you’ll find the same is true of you too. 

***

There you go. Not quite that fresh-baked smell, that warm-from-the-oven, butter-me-now, golden-flakes-on-the-chin sort of freshness that you’re used to. But still toothsome, no?

I mean – if you had a choice between that email and being thumped with a very small ruler, or having a bad-tempered copy-editor repetitively criticise your use of semi-colons, you’d take the email every time, right? 

Me too, old buddy, me too. 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Go on. Tell me. What monkeys chatter in your jungle? What book are you writing now? What others have you written or have started? What other books are in contemplation?

This isn’t quite a feedback-type exercise, I guess, except that there’s something about putting these things out into public that changes you a bit. So: put it out there - by which I mean, log into Townhouse and share it in this forum.

And that idea that you’re not yet really to mention to anyone? Tell us about that too. Let’s enlarge ourselves. Let’s multiply. 

Til soon. 

Harry 

As thrilling as it is to share what I’ve learned in my 20+ years as an editor, one of my favorite experiences as an instructor on Jericho’s Novel Writing Course and Ultimate Novel Writing Programme is watching students learn from each other. 

As the course progresses, and as they get to know and trust each other, they go from suggesting what an author could do to improve their project to what they should do to fiercely protect whatever it is that sparked a story to begin with. Over time, they begin enthusiastically coaxing one another to fan those sparks into something astonishing. 

Whether you’ve written a chapter or a complete draft of a novel, chances are, at some stage, you’re going to feel like you’ve gone as far as you can go on your own. When that moment arrives, it’s time to get some feedback. 

For some writers, it comes when they’ve been over (and over, and over…) a draft and have hit the point where it’s all trees, no forest. It’s time to get some perspective, see what’s resonating with readers, and find out what still needs improvement. Other writers find themselves at a crossroads with their project: a story could go this way or that way, and the implications of choosing either route are huge. In this scenario, an outside reader is a brainstorming partner to help them think through the options.

In either case, sharing your work with others can be a little scary. It’s a vulnerable moment, and having a plan for how to request, receive, and implement feedback can help you make the most of it.

1. Choose wisely

Many writers reach out to those closest to them—friends and family—for feedback, and while that can yield constructive criticism, don’t be surprised if you get a resounding “I love it! It’s perfect! Don’t change a thing!” from dear Aunt Bernice. While that’s lovely to hear, it’s not especially helpful. 

Cherish those champions—that note from your aunt will help you power through your umpteenth revision—but choose readers who are ready to help you improve, too. 

2. Give your readers some direction

Don’t be afraid to guide your readers about what kind of feedback you’re looking for, and avoid asking them yes or no questions. “Do you think the novel is working?” is going to yield less helpful feedback than “What can I do to improve the pacing in the last thirty pages?” 

A list of 5-10 questions can help ensure readers give you feedback you can actually use – and invite them to share anything else they want to with you, too. Whatever you do, please don’t instruct your readers, “Just tell me if I should never write again!” 

Everyone — yes, you included — can improve.

We’ve talked about editing for five weeks now. Those of you following Debi Alper’s superb online Introduction to Self-Editing Your Novel course are reaching its end. (The course is free to members. Interested? Learn more.) And there’s one big topic we haven’t yet broached.

What about third-party help? Do you need it? And when do you need it? And what does an external editor do that a keen self-editor cannot? Today we’ll crack open that can of worms – or rather, we’ll use the handy little ring-pull which enables easy no-crack access.

And let me start by saying two things.

Number one, you don’t get better than a Jericho Writers editor. We use absolutely first class people and we scrutinise their work and if they don’t meet our standards – consistently – they will stop being a Jericho Writers editor.

The quality of editing is not something you can easily tell from a resumé. We have some spectacular editors who have not written bestsellers, or commissioned Hilary Mantel and Dan Brown and the entire Where’s Wally series. But those people are spectacularly good at editing, which is why we use them. So: if you do choose to get third-party editing, you’re in very safe hands with us.

Number two: you don’t need third-party editing. You may want it. You would certainly draw value from it. But you don’t need it. My first book never got third-party editing before I went out to agents. (I wanted it, but couldn’t afford it). But I secured an agent without too much fuss, then had a multi-publisher bidding war for the book, and it became a bestseller. So: good results can happen with no early third-party involvement.

And yes, it’s true that more and more writers are using external editors early on in their journey, and yes, it’s true that that does somewhat alter an agent’s perceptions of what to expect. But that doesn’t amount to me saying that you need an editor. You may not. I got an agent because I wrote a 180,000 word manuscript and I got an agent sitting up till 2.00 in the morning because she couldn’t go to bed until she’d finished it. That’s the basic outcome that you need to achieve. There is no single way to achieve it.

So – I’ve plugged our services (honestly) and I’ve told you (also honestly) that you may not need them. But now let’s dig into the ins and outs of all this. Here are some guidelines to hold onto.

Know the craft

You probably won’t get a novel to a truly publishable standard unless you know your craft. I don’t care how you acquire that knowledge – books and blogs, festivals and feedback groups, courses and classes: they’re all good. But know your craft. You won’t be properly attuned to the countless errors you can make until you’ve done that groundwork.

Edit hard – harder than you think

My first novel was 180,000 words long. When I got to the end of it, I realised I’d got better as I’d gone on. So I deleted the first 60,000 words and rewrote them.

I edited so many times that (going slightly crazy and getting close to the finish line) I went through the whole damn book just to delete surplus commas. (A copy-editor later put them all back, but she put a nice curl on them and settled them just so.)

As a very rough rule of thumb, half your time should be spent writing and another half editing. If one half is going to be bigger, I’d make it the editing half.

I stress this, because you will get vastly more value from a JW editor if you’ve done the work yourself first. Sometimes we get people who send us their manuscripts, and we come back with a report that says Character X is missing this, and Plot Point Y is awry because of that and so on. And the writer tells us, in effect, “Yes, I know all that, but if I fix those things, then what?”

And … well, we’re not magicians. We can only read what’s on the page. Ideally, you would only come to us for editing help if (i) you find yourself going round in circles or (ii) you just don’t know what to do next. But put in the hard yards yourself first. We can be much more productive if you do.

Nothing wrong with testing the water first

Approaching agents is free. Getting editing help from us costs. So a perfectly sensible strategy is this:

1. Write a book
2. Edit the heck out of it
3. Send it to around 10 agents; see what they say
4. If they take you on, then yippedee-doo-dah. Happy days. If they don’t, then …
5. Either:
   1. Re-edit the work if something an agent has said gives you a flash of insight. You can send it out again if you genuinely feel that flash has been transformative. or
   1. Come to us for a manuscript assessment.

I wouldn’t go crazy with the agent submissions. I think it’s just disrespectful to bombard agents. But sending out material to 10-12 agents? Nowt wrong with that.

How to use advice

Because I’ve just spoken about agents and any feedback you may get from them, let me just say now that editorial advice is only ever advice. It’s not a command. It’s not a stone tablet, ablaze with light, brought wonderingly down the slopes of Mount Sinai.

If a particular comment gives you a moment of insight, of recognition, of YES, then work with it. If a comment just doesn’t quite make sense to you, then leave it. Or, to be more accurate: consider it. Very often, an editor may feel a discomfort around X, but their practical suggestion as to what to do doesn’t feel right. In which case, figure out if you feel the editor was right to have that discomfort (they usually are), then consider what you want to do about it.

You are the boss of your own words, always. You should never write text at someone else’s bidding if it doesn’t feel right to you. As a very rough guide, about 60% of the time, you’ll feel that an editor is spot on. A further 20% of the time, you’ll think, “right issue, wrong solution” and go your own way on the topic. And there’s a good chunk of the time where (especially if you’re a stubborn sod, like me) you just think, “No, I like what I wrote” and take no action at all.

When you really, really should come to us for help

Mostly, I think it’s totally up to you when and whether you want to use our editorial help. There’s just one category, where I think you’re pretty much nuts if you don’t use us. I’m thinking here of writers who have had a lot of “almost but not quite” type rejections from agents. If you keep coming close to the prize, then – sweet Lord – get yourself over the line. There’s nothing more powerful than third-party editorial advice in improving a manuscript. It won’t always work to get you over that line, but there ain’t nothing better.

What help to get when?

The default for almost everyone should be a full manuscript assessment. With that, you get a pro editor to read every darn page of your work and give you a detailed, detailed report on what’s working and (especially) what isn’t working and how to fix it. This, in effect, is the backbone of any big publisher’s editorial process. Every manuscript I’ve ever written has gone through that process. Every single one has been improved (except maybe for one, where I had a terrible editor who butchered the book, then published it badly, and lost a ton of money on it. But that really is a rare exception.)

If you’ve already had a manuscript assessment and you think you’re close to the finish line, then you could think about getting a development edit. With that, you get the detailed report AND on-page text commentary and correction. I don’t really like that as a starter service though for anyone. If your book has some fundamental issues (and most books that come to us do), then the on-page correction is effectively swatted aside by some of the more structural edits that are needed. It makes no sense to wallpaper a room, if some of the walls are in the wrong place. But if your manuscript is close to the finish line, then, for sure, a development edit has its place. Our office team won’t let you do a dev edit before you’re ready, so feel free to have an open discussion with them about options.

And finally, there’s the whole area of copy-editing with lighter (proofreading) and heavier (line-editing) flavours available.

Most writers won’t need those services at all. If you get traditionally published, your publisher will pay for all that stuff. You can just sit back and admire those handsomely placed commas.

The group that will certainly need copy-editing is anyone heading for self-publishing: these days, you just can’t hope to win with a shoddily presented manuscript. A scattered group that may think copy-editing is wise includes anyone with sensible reason to doubt their presentation (eg: English as a second language, or dyslexia.)

Either way though. The “edit hard yourself” rule still applies. Sometimes we get a really poorly presented manuscript and the writer is assuming that our copy-editor will just work a kind of magic with it. Not so, old buddy, not so. Your job here is the same: bring the editor the cleanest manuscript you possibly can. I guess a copy-editor picks up 95% or maybe even 99% of issues, but if you have hundreds and thousands of errors and problems scattered through the text, no editor will pick them all up.

The sorrow and the joy

Don’t expect editorial feedback to be an all-joyous thing. It isn’t. You bring us your precious baby hoping for us to dart her off to some Festival of Glorious Infants … but instead, we’re much more likely to tell you that your lovely babe has some terrible problems and will need immediate surgery.

I honestly want to tell our editorial clients to wait 48 hours before emailing us after an MS assessment. You’re likely to have some shock and/or upset, before that gives way to a kind of relieved euphoria. The euphoria, were it to speak, would say (in ancient Greek of course, but I’ll translate), “Wise editor, you have found what is worthy in my book and what is to be cast out. I venerate all that you have done and know that my feet are now set on the path of Righteous Endeavour.”

You will feel relieved (to have the issues made clear to you) and energised (because you know just what to do and how to do it.) You should also feel the book rebuilding itself as you work on it. You should feel it becoming steadily and predictably better as you go through your to do list.

For some writers, this is a one-off process. For others, it isn’t. There’s no right or wrong; only what’s right for you.

If you want to know more, contact our office team (you can just hit reply). They won’t try to sell you anything that’s not right for you. Our only real instruction to them is “honesty, always.”

That’s it from me. Debi’s Last Assignment follows …

Til soon, 

Harry 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY:

This week, it’s Assignment Six from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course.

Revise a scene from your novel, applying the techniques you’ve learned from this course. Share in the forum. Make sure to add feedback on others.

(This fantastic, self-directed video course is FREE to Premium Members. If you’re not one yet, you know what to do: join us here!Alternatively, you can buy the course as a one-off for £99.)

When you're ready, log in to the forum and share your work. Make sure to add feedback on other people's work, too!

Til soon.

Harry

Before I wrote Flat 401, I worked for over a decade as a clinical psychologist. I spent years learning to understand the human mind and people’s experiences, and training to be able to help people overcome emotional challenges. At the time, I didn’t think of it as ‘preparation for novel-writing,’ but it turned out to come in handy!

Below are five ways my clinical background has informed how I write; I hope you might use these ideas too.

1. Tension: threat, not just action

In Compassion-Focused Therapy, we talk about the threat system - the part of the brain that activates when something feels dangerous. Importantly, it doesn’t distinguish between actual threat and perceived threat. The same group of physiological responses can be triggered by a near car crash or by a passive-aggressive text from your partner.

In fiction, this means tension doesn’t require a gun or a chase scene. It can be built on what a character believes might happen: being found out, losing face, hurting someone they love. If your character feels threatened - socially, emotionally, psychologically - the reader will too.

Tip: Identify what your character is afraid of losing (status, safety, love, control), put it in jeopardy – and make sure the reader can see and understand this.

2. Complex characters often don’t act in their own best interests

In the therapy room, people rarely show up with clear motivations. Or, they might express a motivation (‘I don’t want to be depressed or anxious’) but have understandable difficulty getting on board with the path towards that goal – because it’s hard.

Characters don’t need to be likeable (it’s often said), but the more memorable ones do need to be layered. Often, the richest characters are the ones whose behaviour is coherent, but not always free of contradictions.

Tip: Ask yourself, what does this character do that inadvertently sabotages themself? Put some of that into action by showing the unintended negative consequences of them pursuing (or avoiding pursuing) their goals.

For the past four weeks, I’ve talked in detail about how I personally edit a book. Today, I’m still talking about editing, but I want to focus in on the two lode-stars by which I steer. 

The first, always, is pedantry. If you’ve done one of my Live Edit webinars (open to all Premium Members) you’ll know that I’m very, very picky. I always urge those listening to offer their reflections in the chat, but I think it’s safe to say that no one has ever out-pedanted me. 

I care about: 

• Surplus words 

• Irritating commas, or their irritating lack 

• Slightly poor word choices 

• Slightly over-familiar imagery 

• Use of body-part type sentences that are a lazy way to denote feelings 

• Settings that lack real atmosphere 

• Hurrying the delivery of information that could safely be delayed 

• And of course, hunger and world peace, obviously. But I was focusing more on the editorial stuff. 

And that’s not – not even remotely – a complete list of my nitpicks. And yes: any nitpick improves a sentence, but it also, nearly always, points to something a bit bigger. Here’s a tiny example: 

“His words sprayed out incessantly, like water gushing from a broken hose.” 

That’s the kind of thing that would reliably bother me. A hose can’t really be broken, can it? It can be kinked, or punctured, or it can be sliced through, but none of those things are really quite the same as ‘broken’. 

But in any case, the first half of the sentence says ‘sprayed’, the second part says ‘gushing’. A gush is not the same as a spray. Which is it? One implies wide distribution, the other implies narrow-but-abundant distribution. Which way we go here indicates what we’re trying to say about the voluble fellow in the sentence. Is he talking to a large audience or just to one person? We need to fit the image to the situation. 

Whatever the final set of choices here, the image will improve. 

That’s a tiny example. But the picky observation very often widens out into something bigger. 

For example, if you find yourself making a lot of deletions in a particular chapter, simply as part of your “murder all unnecessary words” programme, you may end up realising that this particular chapter has a lot of dead-feeling material. And that may cause you to rethink whether you need the chapter at all. And you may find ways of take the necessary new information / developments from that chapter and deploying them elsewhere. And you may end up reshaping your book in a way that makes a really significant improvement to the flow and feel of that awkward middle section. 

Another common phenomenon: you notice a lot of body-part language. “Her lower lip trembled and she felt the sting of salt tears rising in her eye.” That kind of thing. 

Now there’s a lot that I don’t love there, but the worst bit is that we’re trying to describe a person’s emotions via lip-movements and eye-salt-levels, instead of (duh!) just describing the person’s emotions. “She felt shocked, an almost physical buffet, but following close behind was a kind of horrified sadness, a sense of loss. Could it be that she had lost everything she had fought so hard to keep? And lost everything, in a single minute, through this almost trivial moment of ill-luck?” 

And again, that minor-seeming insight into a dodgy sentence can end up making a difference to the entire book. 

So much for pedantry. But there is also a kind of poetry, or should be, that grows the more you edit. I don’t mean you’re about to win sing-writing festivals or get shelved next to Beowulf… but, there’s a way that you write, that sounds right for you. You want to keep that.  

When it comes to your agent and your editor and your copy-editor, you’ll find there are times that they want to snip away at things that make you you. Walk amongst them unsnipped. These days, I tend to issue a (perfectly polite) note to copyeditors, explaining the aspects of my writing that are non-standard (e.g.: lots of sentence fragments, sentences starting with a conjunction, and so on) that I wish to keep. 

Equally, I’ve had instructions from an editor, that I’ve just ignored – sometimes, but not always, with a word of explanation. That doesn’t make me a crotchety writer; I’m not that. It just makes me a writerly writer: ones who chooses, with care, the words he wants to appear in print. 

Do likewise. 

Til soon, 

Harry

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Five from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course.

(This fantastic, self-directed video course is FREE to Premium Members. If you’re not one yet, you know what to do: join us here! Alternatively, you can buy the course as a one-off for £99.)

Debi would like you to:

• Pick a short paragraph from your novel that includes prose, description, and dialogue, then check for the points mentioned in lesson five of the course.
• When you're ready, log in to the forum and share your work. Make sure to add feedback on other people's work, too!

Let’s face it - there’s nothing like a good plot twist. That delicious moment when your jaw drops, your brain short-circuits, and you immediately flip back a few pages muttering, “Wait, WHAT?”

Contrary to popular belief, plot twists are NOT just for crime writers. Whether you're working on a thriller, a romance, a fantasy epic, or even a literary darling, the plot twist is the literary version of a mic drop - and readers absolutely eat it up.

But why do we love plot twists so much? And more importantly, how do you pull one off without making readers roll their eyes so hard they sprain something?

Let’s twist again, like we did last chapter... (Ba du dum.) 

Why plot twists are so addictive

Plot twists are the espresso shot in your story cappuccino. They jolt readers awake. They make people text their friends at 2 a.m. with “YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK.” They’re proof that the author is five steps ahead, cackling behind the scenes, and we love being fooled like that.  

A good twist does three things: 

• Surprises the reader

• Makes sense in hindsight

• Changes the direction or emotional tone of the story. 

When done well, twists make readers feel smart for spotting the clues - or wonderfully blindsided if they didn’t. Either way, it’s a win. 

Plot twists across genres

You don’t have to write a psychological thriller to serve up a killer twist (though, let’s be real, they practically require one).

Here's how to tailor twists to different genres: 

Crime / Thriller / Mystery 

The plot twist is your bread and butter here. 

Classic moves: The killer was the narrator. The victim faked their death. The detective was the criminal. 

Pro tip: Leave breadcrumbs, but scatter them wide enough that readers miss the loaf. For more advice on pulling this off perfectly, be sure to check out our Crime Writing For Beginners video course with Graham Bartlett. Alternatively, if you’re after that extra level of support, consider our tutored Writing Crime and Thriller Novels course (starting 1 September)... 

University creative writing courses absolutely have their place. Plenty of people get a huge amount out of them. If that’s you, I’m genuinely pleased. Writing should be joyful, and if a university course lit that fire for you, brilliant. 

But they’re not for everyone — and they’re not for me. 

Here’s why I’ve always struggled with the university model (with all due respect to the exceptions out there): 

• They often overlook genre fiction, which is where the vast majority of readers (and many writers) live 

• They’re often run by people with slender commercial track records 

• They don’t tend to focus on the business side of writing — things like agents, submission, and marketing 

• Self-publishing is often ignored entirely 

• It’s rare to get feedback on an entire manuscript, start to finish 

• They don’t properly grapple with plot (because that’s not something you can do by workshopping a couple of chapters) 

• The focus leans more toward earning a degree than getting a damn book published 

Now, none of that makes university courses bad — it just means they have different goals. I care far more about getting a book published than I do about getting a degree. Your preferences may vary and it’s perfectly OK if they do. 

But the reason I raise this is the workshopping phenomenon. Here’s how it works: 

A university gathers together a bunch of people who care a lot about words and writing. They set a challenge: you’re going to write the kind of book that might get published by a cool literary imprint somewhere. Then, they ask Anna to read out 1– 2,000 words of her draft novel, so that Brian and Ciara and Dan and Ezzie and the rest of them can offer their thoughts. This whole process is overseen by an Author of a couple of works, often not even full novels, (whom two of the students secretly fancy) and it’s important to all of the students that they have the approbation of the Author of the two SLNs and so Brian and Ciara and all the rest of them get stuck in and try to show off how cool and literary they are as they give Anna her feedback. 

And look: there are worse things in the world. In fact, what I’ve just described is among life’s better things and loads of people who go through one of these courses will enjoy one of the most rewarding years of their life. So good. If that’s your thing, then go for it. (Though, uh, read the PSes below before you sign up for anything.) 

My reason for telling you all this? Because of the phenomenon that is the Universal Workshop Voice. It’s a thing. I’ve given classes in the past where someone reads me a snatch of their work and I can identify – immediately and accurately – that this has been through the university-style workshopping process. 

A paragraph might start out like this: 

A fly, a fat one, landed on his forearm. Ulf stared at it for a moment, then swatted it with his free hand, killing it. Leaving a fat purple stain, and nothing else. 

I don’t know if that paragraph has any merit. I just made it up now for the purpose of this email. Whether it would ever find a place in one of my books, I don’t know. Probably not. But if you ran that paragraph past Anna and Brian and the gang, it would turn into something like this: 

A fly, fat and freighted with the alien armaments of its kind, landed on his forearm. The blow, when it arrived, shocked even Ulf with its ferocity, a blow born of some dark ancestral killing field, a rapid-fire conversation between neurons that left Ulf himself a mere bystander. Where once there had been insect there was now only pulp, grapey and softly dripping. 

And I don’t even hate that. I mean: I can’t quite imagine wanting to read that book, but maybe someone would. 

Really, my concern here is that Anna’s piece, Brian’s, Ciara’s, Dan’s and Ezzie’s are all sounding pretty damn similar – and they’re sounding similar because the workshopping process exerts the same basic gravity on them all. 

And from my personal editing process, that’s not what I want at all. 

I want to sound like me. I uncover what my tastes are by just going at my manuscript, again and again, sentence by sentence, page by page. I don’t know if that produces the best book. It probably doesn't. I mean: if Hilary Mantel or Sally Rooney or Gillian Flynn were to edit one of my first draft manuscripts, presumably it would start to take on their particular genius-level shine. 

But sod em. I don’t care. This is my book not theirs, and I don’t want their tastes interfering – and I definitely don’t want the Author of two barely-novels to exert any weight at all. And Ezzie? Nice girl and all that, but she can shove off. I don’t want her tastes (or Anna-Brian-Ciara-Dan’s) anywhere near my word-choices. 

I suppose I could justify my attitude in commercial terms – agents and editors prioritise authors with a distinctive voice. Readers probably do too, if only in the sense that those books wind up more memorable. 

But that’s kind of fake. My motive isn’t really commercial; it’s just my personal version of bolshiness. I don’t want to write like Ezzie. I want to write like me. 

And the way I do it? Editing and editing and editing and editing. And yes, using my knowledge of craft to shape my decisions. But mostly working with my own taste. What sounds like me? What do I think is funny? What atmosphere feels right for this scene? Is this sentence better as 10 words or 8? Or lose it completely? 

And flies freighted with alien armaments? Yes gods. Spare me. I’m pleased the damn thing got splattered. 

Til soon, 

Harry 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Four from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It's FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here, or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

• Find a short paragraph from your novel and experiment with different POV’s. If you’re working with multiple characters, ensure each voice is clearly different. Post in the forum (remember to log in first) and share which POV you’ve decided on and why. See if others agree with you.

Once you’ve submitted your manuscript – for a critique, or even to an editor – you will receive a number of responses. Amongst the most common is: “But I just didn’t like the main character.” This can be very dispiriting to hear, particularly if you’ve put enormous amounts of effort into your hero. But if somebody feels it, there’s a good chance that they’re right. 

The tricky thing, of course, is understanding what it is that makes a character likeable.  A corollary to this is “relatable”. There is a maxim that a reader must be able to “relate” to a main character; that is, put him or herself into that character’s shoes. I don’t particularly subscribe to this theory – I no more relate to Achilles in the Iliad  than I do to Dorothea in Middlemarch – but I still want to read about them. However, this is something that concerns editors and readers alike, and in order to work within the modern book market, it's absolutely something that must be considered. 

It is also the case that you want your protagonist to be human: that is, to err, to be impulsive, jealous sometimes, angry when things don’t go well. Think of Bridget Jones and her pratfalls. A character who is entirely good is simply flat, like a pious child in a Victorian children’s book. 

There are many examples of protagonists whose very weaknesses are what make us empathise with them: this is often the case in tragedy.  Othello’s jealousy is something we can understand, and in him we see it extending far beyond the usual bounds. Yet we also see someone whose jealousy we don’t understand: that is, the villain, Iago.  

What’s the difference? It’s the age-old distinction between protagonist and antagonist. They will have similar qualities: bravery, quick-wittedness perhaps, intelligence certainly. But it’s how they use those qualities which compels us either to like or to despise them. If the intelligence is used for selfish or cowardly ends, as with Iago, then we hate him; if the intelligence is blinded by love, as with Othello, then we empathise and, indeed, sympathise. 

Here are some pointers, then, to consider, when you’re crafting your likeable protagonist. 

1. Situation 

Your character can be in a position of power, or in a more relative position of weakness. It is often suggested that protagonists in positions of power are not “relatable”. Again, I don’t like this line of thought, as fiction is about exploring other worlds, including those of people who hold power. We need to be able to explore what the rich think, as well as the poor; all minds and all milieus are the realm of fiction.  

However, it’s still important to render your protagonist likeable within that role. A king can be kindly, for example, and still be a king – and through him, we can still explore what it means to be a king.  

Resist the temptation to put your character in a bad situation simply in order to engender sympathy. Writers can go too far in this direction, by loading misfortunes onto the protagonist. Keep it straightforward and remember that it’s about emotional connection: we want the protagonist to be in a better place by the end, which means psychologically, not necessarily in physical terms.  

Continue here for How I actually edit (IV) here.

Over the last couple of weeks, in celebration of our new Introduction to Self-Editing video course, I’ve spoken about how I (repeatedly and compulsively) correct my manuscript before I ever get to the holy words, THE END. 

Once I do hit those words, I’ll do multiple edits thereafter – some of them with a single, targeted purpose. Other times driven by a much more general hunt for dissatisfaction. On those hunts, I’m always looking for something I don’t love. That’s it. Anything that offends me, or niggles at me. Sand in the shoe: that kind of annoyance, both minor and impossible to ignore. 

Every writer knows that, yes, yes, you have to delete surplus words. Stephen King (a former journalist) once tossed out the idea that the final draft needs to be first draft minus 10%. 

And, OK, that’s not a horrible rule, so SK’s first drafts were probably leaner than most, because he was a professional writer before he ever became a novelist. But SK clearly doesn’t follow his own rule these days, because his work has become quite baggy. And in any case, it makes no sense to set a target for deletions. You have to let your manuscript tell you how long it wants to be. I’d guess that a majority of you need to cut more than just 10%. Cuts of 20-30% are often, often essential. We once made a bestseller by doing a hands-on edit of a manuscript that took it from 180,000+ words to about 90,000. 

There are two reasons why this whole economy drive matters. 

The first is simply that the force of a novel comes down to this equation: 

Force = Emotional power divided by the number of words. 

If the first term remains constant, then just cutting the second one will always, always improve things. 

That sounds dully mechanical, but I’m repeatedly struck by how relentless cutting delivers a kind of magic. Sticky mid-book patches in a novel can throw a somewhat glum, depressed feel over the whole damn thing. Brutal, hard cutting can just relieve that at (almost) a stroke. Two to three days spent on deletions make more of a reliable impact than any other editing intervention I can think of. The novel lifts in the water. Feels harder. Sails faster. The whole craft has more purpose. 

Cutting does that every time. Wow. 

But the other big reason I love cutting is that it exposes the gaps. If your writing is flabby and unconcentrated, you can easily fail to notice that there may be huge things you aren’t saying. You have this background sense of “this writing is possibly a little baggy,” so maybe you make some cuts to address that issue, but you don’t go far enough, so the issue nags anyway. 

But –  

Because you’ve used one paragraph instead of one sentence to get your characters out of the gym and into the taxi, and because you’ve used two sentences to describe clothing, and one to describe a coffee spillage, you think (correctly) that it’s high time you got your character to meet her partner for the Big Argument. So you rush her off to her Big Argument, but never realise all the stuff you haven’t done. Have you properly described the setting where the Big Argument takes place? Did you depict her emotions in the taxi? Did you add a hint of that past infideility which is colouring her perspective?

The best way to find gaps in your manuscript is to cut so hard that there’s no excess verbiage to cover them. Once you strip back the word count, you start to feel where the novel feels empty – lacking. So you add those things back (but rich text, not duplicative, pointless text) and your novel stays lean – but takes on whole layers of new meaning. 

This is a beautiful discipline, because the stuff you cut is always tedious – unnecessarily long ways of saying things that are often quite boring in themselves. Needless dialogue. Statements about settings that really add nothing in terms of atmosphere or feel. 

And then – you see the gaps. Kayleigh is meant to be worried about her upcoming meeting with Jon, but she’s hardly given him a thought – all that clothes description and coffee spillage got in the way. And how could she be going through all this and not be thinking about what happened to her mother under the exact same circumstances 25 years earlier? And what was it like to enter a completely empty house, its front door swinging open and water everywhere? 

The gaps you find are always more interesting than the text you removed, so the whole passage (and the whole book) just gets more layered and dense and powerful. 

If you want more on this, I talk about it in my How To Write a Novel course and, in even more depth, in our Take Your Novel From Good To Great course. Both those courses are free to Premium Members, and if you haven’t yet caught up with the relevant bits, then I’d strongly recommend that you do. If you’re not yet a PM, you can get a taster lesson for free here. Or, why not become a PM today? It’s like wearing a rainbow in your hair, but not as damp. 

That’s it from me. Last Sunday, my girls had a football tournament. And look, I love my kids, and it’s great that girls are into football now, and there’s everything to be said for community endeavour, and there was a pizza van there and almost-adequate coffee. 

But – oh sweet Lord – we started before 8.00 am. And didn’t finish until after 5.00. And I had to watch every damn game. Every damn one, both girls. And now whenever I close my eyes, I see yards and yards of blue nylon, and sunshine, and kids air-kicking balls as they rolled gently along an empty goalmouth.

I earned beer that night, and plenty of it. 

Til soon. 

Harry

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Three from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It's FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here,or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

• Find a paragraph from your novel that has a strong voice, check for the points mentioned in the lesson, and post it in the forum.

Last week, I talked about my micro-editing habit. This week, we expand a bit. The kind of editing I’m going to talk about here is something I also do in the course of writing the first draft, but it operates at a less micro-level.

I told you that I find it hard to make forward progress if I know that parts of the manuscript behind me are messy – and I write detective novels, whose construction is intricate. I don’t plot out my books in huge advance detail. (I might do, if I thought I could do it, but I can’t, so I don’t.)

(Oh yes, and this email is all about editing, because Assignment Two of Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course is live and online right now.)

The kind of things that might send me scurrying backwards are things like:

Character change

In one of my books, something wasn’t working – and I realised that by making a key character male, and in very male surroundings, I had lost something that I wanted. So I jumped back, and made that person a woman: a commanding, powerful, unsettling presence. That shift unlocked something for me; it opened narratives that wouldn’t have existed with a man in that same role.

That’s an example of why I think that in-draft edits can be almost essential at times. Why charge on with writing your draft if you know that you made a misstep early on? Correct that misstep and then see what you have? Yes, you lose time in making the correction, but you’re going to have to make it anyway – and by making it early, you avoid compounding your error.

Plot complications

The architecture of a complex mystery novel is at the outer end of fictional complexity. For me, a good detective novel should make perfect sense as you read it – and does, in fact, make a kind of mathematically complete sense if properly analysed – but readers should also be a bit challenged by it. Ask someone to summarise who-did-what-to-whom-and-why in, say, a Raymond Chandler novel and most readers would turn a little white.

That’s a sweet, enjoyable challenge for the reader, but for me as author, it’s kind of head-wrenching. “Oh hold on, I need a way for X to have escaped from secure confinement, but he also needs to have chosen to go back in, but he needs to have done so in a way that Y couldn’t have known about, so ….”

Those thoughts are crucial to good fiction-making and, for me, they’re ones I always deal with as they arise. Again, getting these things right are (for me) key to forward motion. If I just try to plough on knowing that there are tweaks to make behind me, it just complicates my whole onward plotting process. Solving the niggles when I see them basically removes them from my mental to-do list and makes it easier to focus on what lies ahead.

Settings

Settings are like a character in my books. If a key setting is awry, that also feels like a block to forward progress, so I’ll go and scratch away at the issue until it feels sorted.

Boring bits

And look, no first draft is ever perfect. My first drafts are pretty decent … but that’s only because they’ve been heavily revised before I even hit the final full stop. But, as I work, I’m also generally on the lookout for any material that just seems heavy, long-winded, dull, repetitive, undramatic – anything along those lines.

The reason is partly my messy-room aversion. But it’s also because a boring bit definitely tells you that there’s a problem which needs addressing – but it also often indicates a fundamental plot problem that needs sorting out.

So, let’s take the sort of example that I often run up against. We might have a situation like this:

• There’s a murder and an investigation
• Things go well for a bit, then the regular police investigation starts running into problems and looks like it’s going nowhere. (This kind of issue is basically compulsory in my kind of fiction. The only alternative is that the police are busily chasing up the wrong set of leads.)
• So there often needs to be an “oh, no, this isn’t working” bit … which can often look a bit dull, because it is frustrating to those involved.

Now that’s all fine, except that what if the boring bit is too long? Quite often, the writer – me, for example – will create something dramatic in order to break the tedium. A man with a gun. An assault. A terrible revelation. And it’s easy to think, “Oh great, off we trot again. There was a dull bit, but it was only a few pages long, and now we’re on the road again.”

And OK, that approach may be just what your book needs … but maybe 50% of the time what it really needed was you to go back and delete the boring bit. The added drama now just locks in that boring bit and sets you off on the wrong path.

In the end, any bad bit in your book is telling you that there’s an issue and you may need to delete the last 5,000 words, say, to get back to the last bit where you felt truly settled. Plot is a sequence of stones laid one upon the other. If you sense a wobble, go back to the wobble. Sort it out. Then start building again.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Two from Debi’s Introduction to Self-Editing course. (Free to Premium Members. And if you’re not a Premium Member, then don’t be a Hufflepuff – slither in to membership here or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

• Find a paragraph from your novel that focuses on one of your characters and post it in the forum.
• Check for the points mentioned in this lesson, and don’t forget to offer feedback to others.

Til soon.

Harry